List-Post: [email protected] List-Post: [email protected] Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 18:34:00 +0800 From: Catherine Candee <[email protected]> Director, Scholarly Communication Initiatives California Digital Library University of California
To eScholarship Partners: A number of you have inquired about eScholarship's ePrint Repositories, so I am taking the liberty of assuming this will be of interest to the group. A few points about ePrint archives: (1) The prototype repositories which have just been established are a core piece of the infrastructure for the eScholarship experiment. From the start, eScholarship has been the focus of CDL's effort to exploit the possibilities of digital technologies to meet the needs and desires of faculty and researchers, and to promote fundamental change in the scholarly communication system. We believe that discipline-based archives which encourage self-publishing hold great promise for stimulating open dissemination of scholarship, for focusing and simplifying the problem of persistent access to that scholarship, and for expanding the possibilities for integration within and across disciplines. (2) We are able to offer the repositories at this time because of the timely development and release of excellent self-archiving software called "ePrints" by the Electronics and Computer Science Department of the University of Southampton. The software is already running under Cogprints, the Cognitive Science ePrints Archive, and is inter-operable with other Open Archive Initiative (OAI) compliant archives. There is more information about the software at our web site http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ and at http://eprints.cdlib.org/ and at http://www.eprints.org/ (3) The first three repositories are being made available to communities with widely divergent needs and thus will call for slightly differing functionality and tools in their support. An editorial or advisory board has been named to oversee the use and development of each of the repositories, and distinct peer-reviewed scholarly products will be drawn from or associated with them. In the case of the Dermatology Online Journal, which migrated to CDL servers last July, the journal may exist as a kind of overlay to the broader contents of their repository; in CIAS publications, digital monographs will be created from the contents of the international and area studies repository; and within the Tobacco Control research community, the repository will be available for new research stimulated by the vast digital archives in the new Legacy National Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco. As more repositories are added, and the current repositories are further developed, we will feed back into the community the lessons we've learned along the way. In the end, we hope our effort will contribute broadly to our mutual effort to improve scholarly communication. Again, thank you for your interest in the eScholarship program. Please do not hesitate to contact me with further questions. Catherine H. 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) [email protected] ______________________________________
