E-LIS: E-Prints in Library and Information Science

E-LIS: E-prints in Library and Information Science http://eprints.rclis.org

E-LIS is different of similar initiatives in the sense that it is based in the voluntary work of people with different backgrounds and it has a non-comercial orientation (there is neither fuding or interest in to getting a revenue or profit). It is based in the spirit of the open source initiative in Computing where people world wide work together to build software that is in the public dominion. In our case we work to create a digital library freely available for the LIS community. E-LIS is managed by a international team of volunteers made up of professionals from countries like: Spain, Italy, United States of America, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, South Africa, Czech Republic or India.

In this way we need collaboration from two areas. Firstly, if you publish a journal or organize a conference and want to increasy its visibility in the research community, please get in touch with us. Secondly, if you share our goals and want to be member of an international team, please get in touch with us.

Description

E-LIS is the largest open archive in Library and Information Science. It has been designed as an international open access archive for eprints on LIS and related disciplines. Its purpose is to make the full text of scientific documents visible, accessible, harvestable, searchable and useable by any potential user with access to the Internet. Furthermore this service aims to support individuals who wish to publish or otherwise make their papers (published or not) available world-wide.

Every language has particular editors who are responsible for the quality control of the metadata submitted by authors. In this moment E-LIS has editors for catalan, english, italian, croatian, bosnian and spanish languages.

The self-archiving software system chosen for managing E-LIS in the OAI interoperability framework is GNU EPrints 2.3.3. A GNU EPrints server is an instance of OAI data provider, tailored for author' self archiving of documents in electronic format. The GNU EPrints software is configuratied by default to create a research papers archive, but it could be used for other purposes.

Submitting authors will be responsible of being sure the documents they archive haven't any restriction in their electronic distribution. It will be clear that copyright issues will be matter of the authors and that E-LIS hasn't any responsibility in the contents submitted by the authors. E-LIS web site shows a copyright policy statement. In order to get the maximum number of authors on board, the contribution policy is very simple. In a broad sense any document related by topic with LIS and available electronically in any format could be included in the archive. The basic criteria for acceptance is that documents must be relevant to research in LIS fields and they should have the form of a finished document that is ready to enter into a process of scholarly communication. That doesn’t mean there is no an edition procedure to make sure that authors do not submit garbage of inappropriate content. An editorial board made up of researchers in different areas of our discipline is in charged of examining the documents submitted. The workflow for a typical submission could be as follows:

E-LIS Team [email protected] 1 http://eprints.rclis.org 1. New author registers via a web interface. When registering the author enters metadata about himself like contact addresses or subjects of interest. He can also subscribe to a mailing list where new additions to the archive are announced. 2. Author submits an eprint. The process takes the creation of metadata about the document via web forms (the number of fields to fill in depends on the type of document being submitted, only a few fields are mandatory. If a paper does not match any of the categories provided, the author can ask the editor to include new types) and uploading of the document full text. 3. Submitted documents are placed into a buffer where they are examined by a member of the editorial board who can approve the submission, reject it outright or return it to the author for modifications. 4. When the editorial board has approved the eprint it is included in the archive and can be accessed via the search engine or via the browsing facilities (year or subject). Each eprint is described in an html page that includes a url to the full text. The eprint is now ready to be harvestable via the OAi interface too.

E-LIS requires an electronic version of the document being submitted to be available on the Internet. The document full text could be submitted to the archive, which is the recommended procedure. Nevertheless, metadata including links to the full text available elsewhere will be accepted too. In this last case, the Editorial Board will be responsible of making sure and maintaining that the URLs provided are correct and freely accessible. A document can be stored in several formats. There isn't any restriction in the file format, provided that at least one of the formats of the document being submitted is within a list of preferred formats, which is established and possibly modified by the Administrator. That list is initially set to HTML, PDF, Postscript and ASCII; anyway, HTML and PDF formats will be strongly recommended.

Some statistics

By now, there are 803 e-prints in E-LIS.

Numbers per month

Monthly Statistics E-LIS

Visits 100000 Hits 90000 Files 80000 Pages 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0 sep-03 oct-03 nov-03 dec-03 jan-04 feb-04 mar-04

E-LIS Team [email protected] 2 http://eprints.rclis.org The users

Hits September 2003 to February 2004 Countries with more than 500 hits

Italy US Spain Croatia (Hrvatska) United Kingdom Mexico Czech Republic Argentina Canada France Germ any Netherlands Brazil Sw itzerland Peru Portugal Australia Chile Austria Greece Sw eden Colom bia Israel India

E-LIS Team [email protected] 3 http://eprints.rclis.org