Prior Pertinent AmSci Topic Thread:
"CERN's historic role in OA" (Aug 2005)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#5288
"Eprints, Dspace, or Espace?" (Feb 2003)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/subject.html#2671
On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, Jean-Yves Le Meur wrote:
> > SH:
> > EPrints is free: the world's first, most widely used
>
> This is indeed true in term of number of installations. In term of number
> of documents in repositories, CDS Invenio distributed by CERN (ex CDSware:
> http://cdsware.cern.ch/invenio ) comes easily first :-)
Jean-Yves is absolutely right that CERN's CDS Invenio (formerly CDSware)
comes first among the top dozen digital archiving software installations
in terms of average number of documents (28,327).
SOURCE:
http://archives.eprints.org/
Software #Archs #TotItems #AvItems
EPrints 210 194563 1019
DSpace 162 288074 2667
Bepress 51 96246 2048
ETD-db 23 301394 15863
OPUS 21 6300 350
DiVA 14 9453 675
CDS 9 169963 28327
ARNO 6 157754 26292
HAL 4 39259 9815
DoKS 3 1970 657
Fedora 3 6946 2315
EDOC 2 49687 24844
MyCoRe 1 1984 1984
Others 212 3220717 24216
I would go even further, and point out that CERN's own IR, with 78,774
items, is 11th biggest among all 721 archives registered in ROAR and
3rd biggest among the c. 450 of the archives that are institutional
repositories IRs (rather than central repositories, which draw from the
contents of many institutions), after #1 Wageningen University (110,269)
and #2 Nagoya University (82,625).
http://archives.eprints.org/?country=&version=&type=institutional&order=recordcount&submit=Filter
Moreover, among IRs, CERN's own IR, with its 78,774 items, mostly
full-text, is indeed easily and by far the first (biggest and most
successful). (Wageningen's admirable IR has 110,269 items but only about
half of them are full-text documents, and the nature and percent full-text
of Nagoya's imposing IR, with 82,625, still needs to be ascertained:
a posting from Nagoya would be most welcome!).
I will go still further: CERN leads the world in Open Access IR "Best
Practice" Policy, being the institution with the most comprehensive,
systematic and successful institutional self-archiving mandate (and one of
only 6 institutions worldwide that have a self-archiving mandate at all!).
http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
The only problem is that CERN is not promoting the adoption of its superb
self-archiving institutional self-archiving policy along with its promotion
of the adoption of its CDS software!
CERN is instead too busy trying to reform publishing (so as to hasten
a transition to Open Access Publishing), having already successfully
reformed its own researchers' self-archiving practices.
But "Best Practice" insofar as OA (which is not the same thing as OA
Publishing) is concerned may well begin at home, but it must not *end*
at home!
I would be more than happy to endorse CDS Invenio as OA IR Best Practice,
alongside GNU EPrints -- if and when CERN promotes the adoption of its
own institutional self-archiving policy model along with its CDS software.
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=CERN%3A%20European%20Organization%20for%20Nuclear%20Research
Otherwise CDS Invenio is, and will continue to be, just another of
the softwares that (in its own words) "covers all aspects of digital
library management."
http://cdsware.cern.ch/invenio/
For OA IR "Best Practice" is not "to cover all aspects of digital library
management": it is to focus specifically on the urgent OA priority:
ensuring that 100% of institutional research output is systematically
and successfully self-archived in the OA IR as soon as possible, just
as CERN's is. The outcome is already long overdue. CERN has already
attained it. It is time for CERN to help the rest of the world to attain
it too, by promoting its own institutional Best Practice along with its
(excellent) software!
Meanwhile, that is precisely what GNU EPrints is doing, and has been doing
all along: promoting not the practice of "digital library management"
but the practice of OA self-archiving:
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
Stevan Harnad
Received on Fri Jul 28 2006 - 14:41:58 BST