Tennant, Roy (2002) "Institutional Repositories" Library Journal 9/15/2002 http://makeashorterlink.com/?F3C441CE1
The above informative article by Roy Tennant is well worth reading. We applaud the success of Rob Tansley, Eprints' brilliant original designer, in his subsequent contribution to MIT's wonderful Dspace: http://web.mit.edu/dspace/live/ All archive-creating software is very welcome, especially if it is free, though the real challenge for all of us now is not so much to MAKE archives but to get them FILLED as soon as possible! http://tardis.eprints.org/ Roy writes: "DSpace is designed to be a more flexible solution than ePrints. It makes fewer assumptions regarding what type of object is being uploaded. Since the programmer who developed ePrints is now a key developer with the DSpace project, DSpace has roots in ePrints but has no doubt surpassed it. MIT is the only user, but once the software is released in open source, other institutions may choose to implement it. I hope they will! But I wouldn't write off ePrints just yet! Its features and flexibility have likewise been growing quite remarkably since Rob's day http://software.eprints.org/docs/php/history.php and have now made it configurable for adoption as a journal-archive for new open-access journals or established journals converting to open access: http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/. It has also been expanding its all-important reference-linking and scientometric potential, along with sister OAI services such as citebase http://citebase.eprints.org and paracite http://paracite.eprints.org/ and may soon be expanding into the still broader domain of data-archiving: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/esci4.htm It is true that ePrints is very consciously focussed on institutional research output in particular -- both pre AND post peer review, Roy! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0661.html -- and that its raison d'etre is to help get that literature in particular (about 2,000,000 papers annually, appearing in about 20,000 peer reviewed journals worldwide) self-archived and openly accessible as soon as possible. But it has also been adding more and more other features that institutions may well be wanting now or in the future http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00006768/ and is always hewing to feedback from its growing user base to add still more features and flexibility as desired by users: http://software.eprints.org/users.php But institutional research output is still by far the most important target for us all, and will no doubt be the one that brings all the other kinds of content and features on board, once it reaches critical mass. http://www.sellic.ed.ac.uk/publicat/updates/ud0502.html#eight Hence MIT is surely performing at least as great a service by setting the world's universities the splendid example of FILLING its own DSpace as in eventually making its software available for others to use too! Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the free OAI institutional archiving software site: http://www.eprints.org/