ePrints UK

The ePrints UK Project

The ePrints UK project is developing a series of national, discipline-focused services through which the higher and further education community can access the collective output of e-print papers available from compliant Open Archive repositories, particularly those provided by UK universities and colleges.

Discipline-focused views of available eprints will be provided through the use of an automatic subject-classification Web service offered by OCLC. Furthermore, the project will use 'name authority' and 'citation analysis' Web services (offered by OCLC and the University of Southampton respectively) to enhance the metadata harvested from available archives.

The project will build upon RDN's experience in implementing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to share metadata between the RDN partners to create the aggregated search facility, ResourceFinder. ePrints UK will benefit from the RDN partners' expertise in developing services tailored for particular subject audiences, the considerable existing user base visiting existing RDN services and the ongoing work of the JISC funded Subject Portals Project.

This project is the result of a proposal addressing areas a) and b) of JISC Circular 1/02, supporting institutions in the disclosure of their assets and harvesting institutional metadata using the OAI protocol into a national service that will be available to the community.

One of the key non-technical workpackages is a series of supporting studies. The first of these covering 'Prospects for institutional e-print repositories in the United Kingdom' is now available. Full details of the various workpackages are available in the Project Plan.

Background

As the 'Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives' meeting in July 2001 showed, there is an increasing interest in the development of e-print archives as a mechanism for disclosing institutional assets. The development of such services brings a number of benefits to the institution, both internally and externally:

• Researchers benefit through wider (and more rapid) dissemination of their work, resulting in more "research impact".
• PG and UG students benefit, as university publications are readily accessible via the institution's virtual learning environment, library system and institutional portal.
• The university benefits from a higher profile by making all output publicly (and freely) available.
• The university benefits by having a comprehensive, managed and preserved record of its research output, instantly available for RAE or related exercises.

However, to take full advantage of the possibilities for disclosing institutional research, not only does the material have to be made available but there have to be complementary services that provide easy access to it; ePrints UK will provide one such service.

ePrints UK Service Demo

A Service Demo is now available (since late May 2004) at: http://eprints-uk.rdn.ac.uk/ This is the basic version of the ePrints UK Portal. The Statistics option on the toolbar gives information about the harvested items in the repository, and how the repository has grown over time since January 2004. The charts are clickable, and information about the data providers who have been harvested (you will need an SVG Viewer plug-in to view the charts). The number of metadata records is now approaching 26,000. Please explore the demo, and feel free to comment if you have any suggestions or observations about the interface and the available options. Also, if you know of other harvestable resources in the UK which might be usefully included, we'd be happy to hear of them.

Links with Other Projects

Open Archives Forum

UKOLN have in the past been involved in other eprint related projects. The Open Archives Forum, which ended in September, provided a Europe-based focus for dissemination of information about European activity related to open archives and, in particular, to the Open Archives Initiative. The aim of the Forum was to facilitate clustering of IST projects, national initiatives and other parties interested in the open archives approach. In order to do so, the Forum brought interested parties together to build a community of interest, enable exchange of information and establish a web-based European information source for open archives. In addition, the Forum undertook comparative reviews of technical and organisational issues.

One of the key outcomes of the project is the Open Archives Forum online tutorial, which allows users to:

• gain an overview of the history behind the OAI-PMH and an overview of its key features;
• achieve a deeper technical insight into how the protocol works;
• learn something about some of the main implementation issues;
• find some useful starting points and hints that will help as an OAI implementer.

The tutorial will be used as part of a tutorial day on the OAI PMH at OAI3: Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication: Implementing the benefits of OAI at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland on the 12th of February 2004.

eBank UK

In September 2003 JISC funded the eBank UK Project which will investigate the issues surrounding provenance and the use and re-use of original data for research and learning purposes, and will result in the development of an eBank UK pilot service for the benefit of the HE and FE communities. eBank UK builds on the ePrints UK project and on outputs from the EPSRC-funded e-Science Combechem Project. The concepts underpinning the pilot bring together both research and learning and teaching activities in an innovative manner and they seek to demonstrate the direct relationship between the two areas, which results in the growth and development of rich knowledge structures. The project is to be led by UKOLN, University of Bath in partnership with the University of Southampton, and PSIgate, University of Manchester.