Handbook

EPrints Handbook
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A Guide to Starting Self-Archiving

Before Depositing Your First EPrint
Logging on for the first time and registering as a new user
Adding an EPrint
Keeping your publication record up to date
Metadata
The importance of accurate records
Behind the Scenes
What happens to an EPrint once you have deposited it?
Editing EPrints
Making corrections, adding published versions

A Guide to Self-Archiving and Open Access

Overview and Glossary
The who, what, where, when and why of self-archiving and open access, plus explanations of the importance of research access and impact.
Objections to Self-Archiving
A discussion of some common worries and prejudices that many academics hold about self-archiving.
Achieving Open Access through Self-Archiving
The Road to Open Access, including the roles of the various stakeholders.

Managing an EPrints Service

Installing an EPrints Server

Actions for Research Institutions to Achieve Open Access

Research institutions should adopt a research policy that mandates open access for all university research output. The current publish or perish strategies should now be qualified as publish with maximum impact or perish. A sample policy is provided below as a guideline.

In order to gain the maximum possible benefit from the archive's collected research output, the institution would adopt a standardized online-CV with harvestable performance indicators and links to open-access full-texts. (An experimental example of this kind of system is available at http://paracite.eprints.org/cgi-bin/rae_front.cgi.) A realistic short-term aim would be to mandate that all administrative information collection which relates to papers will be performed by querying the eprints archive.

Declaration of Institutional Commitment to implementing the Berlin Declaration on open-access provision and the WSIS Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action

Our researchers are paid (and their research projects are funded, often with tax-payers' money) to conduct research and to publish their findings ("publish or perish") so that other reseachers, at other universities and research institutions worldwide, can access, use, build-upon, cite and apply those findings. This is called "research impact". The productivity and progress of research depend on its impact.
Research is published in peer-reviewed journals (24,000 worldwide, across all disciplines and languages, publishing about 2,500,000 articles per year).
Unlike book-authors or journalists, research-article-authors do not seek royalties or fees for these writings: They write them only for the sake of research impact. (This is why these authors and their institutions were always willing, in the paper era, to undertake the effort and expense of mailing out hard-copies of their articles to any would-be users who requested a reprint, and were sometimes even willing to pay page-charges to the journal for publishing their article. Greater research impact means (i) career advancement, higher salary, more research income, prizes and prestige for the researchers and their institutions and, more important, (ii) greater research productivity and progress, hence greater benefits to the tax-payers who fund the research.)
In the paper era, the only way for journals to cover the costs of peer-review and publication was to charge subscription tolls for access: Universities and research institutions paid the tolls so their own researchers could access and use the peer-reviewed research output of other universities and research institutions.
No institution could ever afford toll-access to anywhere near all 24,000 journals; and most could only afford a small fraction of them -- a fraction that keeps shrinking with rising journal prices, even in the Web era.
As a result, it was true in the paper era -- and is still true today, in the Web era -- that for each one of the 2,500,000 articles published yearly, most of its would-be users cannot access it. That means much of its potential research impact is being lost.
In the paper era, this impact loss was unavoidable, but in the Web era it is no longer necessary. There are two complementary ways in which all access-denial -- and hence all impact-denial -- can now be remedied:
New "open-access" journals can recover their costs other than by charging the user-institution, as toll-access journals do, for each journal or article they access. (For example, they can instead charge the author-institution for each outgoing article they publish). (But fewer than 1000 such open-access journals exist so far, publishing only about 5% out of the 2,500,000 articles that are published every year.)
For the remaining 95% -- the articles published yearly in the 23,000 toll-access journals -- the immediate solution to put an end to access denial and impact loss is for their authors to self-archive their full-texts online on their own institutional open-access websites for all would-be users worldwide.
As soon as universities, research institutions and research funders extend their existing "publish or perish" policies from just publishing their research output to also providing open access to it -- via (8), by publishing it in an open-access journal whenever a suitable one exists, and otherwise via (9), by self-archiving all their toll-access journal publications -- the open-access era will be upon us, and research progress and productivity will at last be maximised, instead of needlessly minimised, as it is now.

Our institution hereby commits its support to open access provision
by signing the Berlin Declaration http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/signatories.html
and implementing an institutional open-access provision policy
(e.g., http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/archpolnew.html ).