What exactly are eprints?

“Removing access barriers for this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the training from the wealthy using the poor and also the poor using the wealthy, get this to literature as helpful as possible. ”
Budapest Open Access Initiative.

Eprints are electronic copies of educational papers. Eprint archives allow authors to create their pre-refereed ‘preprints’ as well as their publish-refereed, printed ‘reprints’ freely available around the world scholarly and scientific community on the scale that’s impossible in paper.

At Nottingham we’re concentrating on making postprints freely open to a broader audience.

There’s you don’t need to stop publishing in traditional journals – depositing an eprint is complementary to traditional publishing.

Do you know the benefits of you?

“Even small barriers to gain access to reduce usage considerably”
Odlyzko, Learned Publishing (2002) 15 :7-9.

Wider access
No library are able to afford a regular membership to each possible journal and thus the majority of the research literature isn’t readily available to many researchers. Eprints archives lower access barriers by looking into making papers freely available.

“online content is better reported due to simpler availability”
Lawrence, Nature (2001) 411 :521.

Improved impact
Eprint archives make papers more visible. Papers are freely readily available for others to see and cite. Studies have shown that online for free availability substantially increases a paper’s impact.

“the papers in most registered Eprints Archives could be harvested and looked. supplying seamless use of all of the eprints, across all of the Eprint Archives, as though these were all-in-one global, virtual archive”
Harnad, To Whom the Gate Tolls?

Mix searching
Eprints servers create the opportunity of a worldwide network of mix-searchable research information.

The items in servers all over the world could be looked concurrently using the OAI (Open Archives Initiative ) protocol. The Nottingham eprints archive is mix-searchable using OAI standards.

You are able to mix search OAI archives while using ARC experimental internet search engine or OAIster which aims to supply a one-stop look for users thinking about helpful digital sources. Eprints archives will also be listed in standard search engines like google for example Google (e.g. do a google search for articles on Futuretalk by Peter Stockwell).

“One particularly important feature of full texts — their reference list — is perhaps probably the most natural and effective method of interconnecting and navigating this literature.”
Outdoors Citation Project

Useful services
Eprints servers can offer authors with information on hits on their own papers and instantly provide an online publications list (e.g. Barrett ). Departmental publication lists (e.g. Division of Mathematical Physics ) will also be possible. Developing services like the Open citation Project try to provide enhanced reference linking and provide authors citation and impact analysis of the work.

What else could you do?

Retain

We’d encourage you to definitely keep whenever we can, or at best the authority to publish a duplicate of the work on the internet. There are a variety of steps you can take:

• Positively support journals which have liberal contracts
• Speak to your writer should they have a restrictive agreement and negotiate the best
• Amend the agreement you sign to help keep (a minimum of) electronic distribution legal rights.

Many publishers will really permit you to renegotiate or amend the agreement should you raise this together. A recommended wording for contributing to the form continues to be submit by Professor Stevan Harnad from the College of Southampton:

“I hereby transfer to writer or journal all legal rights to market or lease the written text (on-paper as well as on-line) of my paper paper title . I retain only the authority to distribute it free of charge for scholarly/scientific purposes, particularly, the authority to self-archive it openly online on the internet.Inch

Deposit papers

“The freeing of the present and future refereed research all access- and impact-barriers forever has become entirely at the disposal of researchers. Offspring is searching over our shoulders, and won’t judge us flatteringly when we still delay”
Harnad, To Whom the Gate Tolls?

If you’re a person in the College of Nottingham then we wish you to definitely deposit copies of the printed articles and conference papers on the eprints server.

Presuming the writer enables self-archiving or you have retained the authority to self-archive then your Deposit Guide gives information on how to get this done. Please be aware that we are able to only archive writer created PDFs with explicit permission from the writer, deposit your personal final form of the manuscript rather if this isn’t the situation.

Possible concerns

Research papers are ‘give away’ literature that authors desire to gain impact not earnings. This eprint initiative doesn’t encompass other kinds of printed literature that authors expect a royalty.

Many traditional journals allows author self archiving, although most don’t publicise this. Stevan Harnad has discussed authors’ concerns on .

Qc and peer review

There’s you don’t need to stop publishing in traditional journals and peer review isn’t compromised by eprints archives.
See Harnad’s response to peer review worries. The most crucial point is the fact that many papers could be printed in journals as well as deposited within an eprint archive.

More information

For more info on eprints at Nottingham please speak to your subject librarian .

Site Policies

Info on Nottingham ePrints policies regarding being able to access and re-using deposited products can be seen on the separate Policies page.

Software

This archive is running on eprints.org open archive software. a freely distributable archive system offered by eprints.org .

Eprints.org is devoted towards the freeing from the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving.

The generic form of eprints is fully interoperable with all of other OAI-Compliant Open Archives. Which means that n’t i longer matters where papers are archived the papers in most registered OAI-compliant Archives could be harvested while using OAI protocol into one global “virtual archive” by Open Archives Providers like the Mix Archive Searching Service.

Outdoors Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that try to facilitate the efficient distribution of content. Outdoors Archives Initiative has its own roots in order to enhance use of e-print archives as a way of growing the supply of scholarly communication. Ongoing support of the work remains a cornerstone from the Open Archives program. The essential technological framework and standards which are developing to aid the work are, however, in addition to the both the kind of content offered and also the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to possess much broader relevance in opening use of a variety of digital materials.

Nottingham ePrints is running eprints.org software, and matches the Outdoors Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI2.) for open archive interoperability. Its OAI Base URL is eprints.nottingham.ac.united kingdom/cgi/oai2 .

Software Version: EPrints 3.3.12