This is to announce that, to coincide with today's Open Meeting in
Washington to announce the release of OAI 1.0:

http://www.openarchives.org/DC2001/OpenMeeting.html

we have simultaneously released the OAI 1.0-compliant version of the
eprints.org archive-creating software Eprints Version 1.1.1

http://www.eprints.org/

The eprints software (originally created by Matt Hemus as CogPrints
<http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk>, and then extensively re-designed for
OA-compliance and generality by Robert Tansley, and recently upgraded
to OAI 1.0 by Chris Gutteridge, all at Southampton University) has been
made as flexible and adaptable as possible, so that all universities
and research institutions can immediately adopt and configure it with
minimal effort for all disciplines. Hence it complements centralised,
discipline-based archiving with distributed, institution-based
archiving.

The generic version of eprints is fully interoperable with all other
OAI-compliant Open Archives. This means that it no longer matters where
papers are archived: The papers in all OAI-compliant Archives can be
harvested using the OAI protocol
<http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.htm>
into one global "virtual archive" by Open Archives Service Providers
<http://www.openarchives.org/sfc/sfc_services.htm>
such as the Cross Archive Searching Service
<http://arc.cs.odu.edu/>

Below are the most recent features, followed by a testimonial from
California Digital Libraries, one of the early adopters of the
eprints.org software, and some relevant chronology and URLs/

Note that all existing Eprints Archives can be upgraded to OAI
1.0-compliance with the new release. The software is free and will
shortly be open-sourced.

See:

    How and Why to Free the Scholarly and Scientific Research
    Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm

Stevan Harnad

------------------------------------------------------------------
EPRINTS 1.1

    New features should be regarded as stable; they have been well
    tested but they have not yet been extensively tested "in the
    field".

    Key Upgrades include:
        OAI 1.0 compliance
        support for MySQL not running on localhost
        support for multiple instances of eprints running on
                one mod_perl/apache server (1.0 claimed to do this
                but had some problems)
        new datafield "username" representing users to associate
                the item with.

    Bugfixes:
        mod_perl namespace collisions with multiple eprints (mentioned
                above).
        removed GNU-only command options from installation scripts.

    Please remember to use the online bug tracking system for reporting
    problems:  http://bugs.eprints.org

    Note the new logo (symbolic of piecing together the global Eprint Archive
    out of the individual OAI-compliant ones)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 21:06:41 +0800
From: Catherine Candee <catherine.candee@ucop.edu>
To: Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Subject: ePrints and eScholarship

Stevan,

Though we haven't met, I wanted to write you personally to thank you for
making ePrints available. Your software is a major contribution to our
mutual effort to transform the scholarly communication cycle. I am the CDL
director responsible for the eScholarship program, where we are making good
use of ePrints. Our repositories provide the foundation of the eScholarship
infrastructure.

We are providing the first three repositories to scholars in International
and Area Studies, Dermatology, and Tobacco Control Research beginning
tomorrow, Jan 19, 2001. We expect we will have some interesting findings
as they begin to actively test and use these prototype repositories. We
have some models for how the repositories will logically fit together with
the kind of wider sphere of surrounding scholarly products we envision
(e.g., DOJ as overlay journal), but there are many particular issues still
to be resolved which may have implications for how the software is
developed.  We will try to report as much as we can what we learn in our
experiment with ePrints.

So, on behalf of the eScholarship team and the open archive community, I
thank you for this wonderful piece of code. You will be receiving a more
formal letter tomorrow, addressed to all eScholarship partners and
contributors, which will detail more of the CDL and eScholarship
activities. ePrints will be prominently featured in the letter.

Best regards,
Catherine Candee
Director, Scholarly Communication Initiatives
California Digital Library
University of California
300 Lakeside Drive 6th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612-3550

510.987.0425
510.893.5212 (Fax)
Catherine.Candee@ucop.edu

______________________________________

             SOME RELEVANT CHRONOLOGY AND URLs

    Psycoloquy (Refereed On-Line-Only Journal) (1989)
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy

    "Scholarly Skywriting"  (1990)
    http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html

    Physics Archive (1991)
    http://arxiv.org

    "PostGutenberg Galaxy" (1991)
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.html

    "Interactive Publication" (1992)
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad92.interactivpub.html

    Self-Archiving ("Subversive") Proposal (1994)
    http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

    "Tragic Loss" (Odlyzko) (1995)
    http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/tragic.loss.txt

    "Last Writes" (Hibbitts) (1996)
    http://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/lastrev.htm

    NCSTRL: Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (1996)
    http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu

    University Provosts' Initiative (1997)
    http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/

    CogPrints: Cognitive Sciences Archive (1998)
    http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk

    Journal of High Energy Physics (Refereed On-Line-Only Journal) (1998)
    http://jhep.cern.ch/

    Science Policy Forum (1998)
    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5382/1459

    American Scientist Forum (1998)
    http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html

    OpCit:Open Citation Linking Project (1999)
    http://opcit.eprints.org

    E-biomed: Varmus (NIH) Proposal (1999)
    http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/pubmedcentral.htm

    Open Archives Initiative (1999)
    http://www.openarchives.org

    Cross-Archive Searching Service (2000)
    http://arc.cs.odu.edu

    Eprints: Free OAI 1.0-compliant Eprint-Archive-creating software (2001)
    http://www.eprints.org

    Harnad Home Pages
    http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnad/
    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/

NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free
access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the
American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01):

    http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html

You may join the list at the site above.

Discussion can be posted to:

    september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org