1. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk ePrints UK: a service provider project Ruth Martin UKOLN, University of Bath r.martin@ukoln.ac.uk

2. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk A few definitions first… An e-print is an electronic copy of an academic research paper, either before the stage of refereeing and acceptance by a scholarly journal (“pre-print”) or after (“post-print”).

3. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk Definitions continued… An e-print archive is a repository of metadata and sometimes the full text of e-print papers. It provides a simple interface to allow the depositer to enter the metadata for the article as well as attaching the full text.

4. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk OAI-compliant e-print archives …share the same metadata to make their contents interoperable with one another and thus allow the metadata to be harvested by other OAI-compliant archives.

5. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk Why archive? “online articles are more highly cited because of easier availability" Steve Lawrence, Nature (2001) vol 411, no. 6837, p.521.

6. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk More definitions… The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) provides an interoperability framework for metadata harvesting. A data provider is a source repository of e- print metadata records. A service provider harvests those records using the OAI-PMH.

7. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk ePrints UK A service provider project Funded by JISC under the FAIR programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/ programmes/fair.html Partnered by the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), University of Southampton, and OCLC.

8. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk ePrints UK architecture

9. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk A technical project? Shortage of UK based e-print archives Shortage of records in those archives Bias towards scientific and technological subjects Cultural, managerial, legal, and technical barriers to overcome.

10. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk How to tackle the record shortage problem? Harvest from international archives But we’re called ePrints UK! Help other FAIR projects to advocate the development of e-print (and e- thesis) archives and the practice of self- archiving.

11. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk Barriers IPR issues Quality control Inertia Politics Institutional identity v subject identity

12. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk For some answers… Try the SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist and Resource Guide The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR-Guide.html

13. www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk ePrints UK needs you! Ruth Martin r.martin@ukoln.ac.uk Tel: 01225 386354 UKOLN University of Bath Bath BA2 7AY