Open Access and Institutional Repositories with EPrints

EPrints is the most flexible platform for building high quality, high value repositories, recognised as the easiest and fastest way to set up repositories of research literature, scientific data, student theses, project reports, multimedia artefacts, teaching materials, scholarly collections, digitised records, exhibitions and performances.

Within this site you will find information and resources to make open access a reality within your own institution: open source software and support, commercial hosting, training and development services and also open access advice and information.

Training Latest: The collected material from EPrints training courses is now available in the EPrints Training Library.

EPrints Repository Software

EPrints open source software is a flexible platform for building high quality, high value repositories. It is recognised as the easiest and fastest way to set up repositories of research outputs of literature, scientific data, theses and reports or multimedia artefacts from collections, exhibitions and performances.

"EPrints is quick to install, easy to configure, and needs minimal maintenance" Arthur Sale, 2005

"[EPrints] developers are on the ball, offering features that faculty will actually find useful" Dorothea Salo, 2007

Archive Documents, Multimedia and Data
Multi-Language Support
OAI Compliant

An Institutional Repository is the best way to provide Open Access to research output.

269 known archives are running EPrints worldwide.

Total records in known archives: 519952

EPrints is developed at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK.

EPrints Services

The EPrints services team provides a fee-based advice and consultancy service that can deliver a range of solutions, from initial help and guidance through to a completely managed service for an institutional repository.

We have experience with deploying repositories at all scales, ranging from large, broad-based research universities to single-subject departments, and will take time to understand your particular requirements. Our goal is always to deliver a repository that fulfils all your needs.

"moved the institutional repository forward swiftly, efficiently and successfully." The Open University

"speed of response has been phenomenal" Bournemouth University

EPrints Community

EPrints has a growing community of users and enthusiastic supporters around the world.

Our dedicated community programme, works with the community to ensure EPrints meets their needs and to help spread best practice.

Open Access to Research

We are creating the environment in which Open Access will become the norm for distributing research:

ROAR tracks the growth of existing OA Archives.
ROARMAP tracks the growth of institutional self-archiving policies.
ROMEO tracks journal/publisher "green" policies on author self-archiving
The OAA Bibliography tracks the studies on the OA advantage in research usage and impact.
The Self-Archiving FAQ tracks and answers questions about self-archiving.
Citebase tracks citations: a scientometric OA search engine.
The American Scientist Open Access Forum has been tracking OA progress since 1998.
News and views blogs
- Open Access Archivangelism by Stevan Harnad
- EPrints Insiders on institutional repositories, especially those built with EPrints

Other Projects

CiteBase is part of an effort to improve online services for the research community, These resources will provide a rich information source and navigation system (based on impact and other metrics) to the self-archiving movement.

The Open Citation Project developed reference Linking and Citation Analysis for Open Archives.

OAI: The Open Archives Initiative is making all OAI-compliant Archives interoperable. The EPrints software creates OAI-Compliant Archives.

BOAI: Budapest Open Access Initiative is a worldwide coordinated movement to make full-text online access to all peer-reviewed research free for all.

Paracite: Dynamic parsing of references and assisted web searching to find the full texts of those references.

52nd Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate: Comhghairdeas, Eire!

11/08/2008/ Ireland's Higher Education Authority (HEA) has adopted the planet's 52nd Green OA Self-Archiving mandate (Ireland's 2nd mandate; the 27th funder mandate overall) and it chose the optimal mandate model: EURAB's.

Comhghairdeas, Eire! The mandate's text is well worth reading (and emulating) in detail.

51st Green OA Self-Archiving Mandate: European Union's 7th Framework

22/08/2008/ The European Commission has now mandated Green OA self-archiving for 20% of its 7th Framework Funding. This is the 51st Green OA Mandate worldwide (and the 26th funder mandate: The European Research Council (ERC), another European research funder, had earlier likewise mandated Green OA.)
    From ROARMAP: Institution's/Department's OA Self-Archiving Policy
    The pilot covers approximately 20% of the FP7 budget and will apply to specific areas of research under the 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7): Health, Energy, Environment, Information and Communication Technologies (Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics), Research Infrastructures (e-Infrastructures), Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities, Science in Society.
    New grant agreements in the areas covered by the pilot will contain a clause requiring grant recipients to deposit peer reviewed research articles or final manuscripts resulting from their FP7 projects into their institutional or if unavailable a subject-based repository... within six or twelve months after publication, depending on the research area.

News Archive