William Nixon says the question most frequently asked of the DAEDALUS
project is "'Why are you using both EPrints and DSpace?" His admirably
thorough and practical Ariadne article
DAEDALUS: Initial experiences with EPrints and DSpace at the
University of Glasgow
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/nixon/#16
goes only some way to answering the question. What it shows is that
both EPrints and DSpace are well suited to building institutional eprint
archives, and illustrates those features that will help administrators
choose between the two.
Where the article isn't convincing is in its conclusion that EPrints
and DSpace enable a "twin-track approach". DAEDALUS has used GNU
EPrints software for published and peer-reviewed papers and "chosen
to swap DSpace into the mix for the pre-prints and grey literature
service".
This strange decision has at least one unfortunate consequence:
"By default EPrints deals with the existence of preprint (and
postprint) versions very elegantly and provides both backward and
forward links to different versions automatically. Our decision to
split the location of the preprint from the final version has meant
that we could not take advantage of this excellent feature."
It is extremely helpful to have this comparative experience. The real
lesson here seems to be: choose one software that suits the needs of your
institutional eprint archive, set it up with confidence because it will
work, and start filling the archive.
The good news from another article in the same issue of Ariadne
Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff
by Theo Andrew
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/andrew/
is that work performed for the Theses Alive! and SHERPA projects found
"over 1000 peer-reviewed journal articles" online in the ed.ac.uk domain,
and that they will be contacting the pre-existing self-archiving authors
and gathering initial content: "The material is already out there;
we just have to look for it".
Steve
Received on Fri Oct 31 2003 - 18:39:06 GMT