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EPrints: creating Open Access Repositories

Enabling libraries to set up a repository for open access research outputs is becoming increasingly necessary in today's connected world.

EPrints is a tool designed specifically to facilitate the building of high quality, OAI-compliant repositories, which can contain research literature, scientific data, theses, images, reports – essentially any content.

To address these issues, EIFL-FOSS and EIFL-OA organised an online session on EPrints, an open source repository creation tool as part of the EIFL-FOSS Themed Weeks Programme.

The guest contributors were:

  • William J Nixon, Digital Library Development Manager, University of Glasgow,
  • Miha Peternel, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, 
  • Tigran Zakaryan, Lab. manager at Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics and EIFL-OA country coordinator in Armenia. 

William presented a general introduction to the whys and hows of EPrints, while Miha presented a case study explaining why his library chose EPrints and how easy it was to install and customize. Similarly Tigran's contribution focussed on the institutional need and implementation.

Read the news article about the session (including links to the recording of the session and the Q&A wiki).

What is EPrints?

As the first professional software platform for building high quality OAI-compliant repositories, EPrints is already established as the easiest and fastest way to set up repositories of open access research literature, scientific data, theses, reports and multimedia.

EPrints 3 is generic repository building software developed by the University of Southampton, UK. It is intended to create a highly configurable web-based repository. EPrints is often used as an open archive for research papers, and the default configuration reflects this, but it is also used for other things such as images, research data, audio archives - anything that can be stored digitally.

The EPrints series began in early 2000 and is in use by almost 400 sites.

What are the benefits of an EPrints repository?

EPrints repositories provide:

  • High specification repository platform for high visibility, high quality institutional open access collections,
  • Time saving deposits,
  • Import data from other repositories and services,
  • Autocomplete-as-you-type for fast data entry,
  • Tightly-managed, quality-controlled code framework,
  • Flexible plugin architecture for developing extensions.

EPrints repositories are:

  • Are optimised for Google Scholar,
  • Work with bibliography managers,
  • Work with desktop applications and new Web 2.0 services (RSS feeds and email alerts keep researchers up to date and it is easy to integrate reports, bibliographic listings, author CVs and RSS feeds into institutional corporate web presence). 

EPrints case studies:

EPrints repositories in EIFL partner countries

Some examples of EPrints repositories in EIFL partner countries:

Useful links:

All of the presentations from the online session can now be found here.