The versatility of EPrints v3 plugins to support new applications is already becoming evident, as this enquiry from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, shows. I am grateful to Michel Avital of Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western and Tim Miles-Board from the EPrints team for permission to reproduce this dialogue.
Q (MA) We're in the process of setting up a working paper journal. The journal is set to be OA and peer-produced.
We found ePrints impressive and would like to use it for the management of our journal. ePrints is designed as an easy to manage repository of documents and provides browse tools, search tools, document tagging and uploading tools, and users registration and management. These are all great.
However, ePrints treats an uploaded document as a black box or a fixed object and (to my understanding) lacks any way of changing it. We found this a limitation in our instance because we'd like to have some control over the layout of the uploaded papers. At minimum, we'd like to add a cover page that includes a masthead, keywords, and a copyright notice. It would be nice to add a uniform header/footer and page numbers, etc (following the Acrobat example).
In all, it seems that ePrints can take care of the environment or repository management but not the documents itself. I wonder if I have missed something or if there is any way to control the layout of the documents.
A (TM-B) Adding a cover page to a PDF document is something that has been implemented by a member of the EPrints community for EPrints 2.
The latest version of EPrints, v3.0 introduces a plugin architecture for many types of plugin, including
conversion plugins.
The aim of the Erints 3 plugin architecture is to allow end users to extend the functionality of their repository without having to alter the core code of EPrints. This means that the upgrade path is unaffected - the repository owners can safely upgrade to future versions of EPrints without having to worry about managing, reapplying and re-testing patches after each upgrade.
We have already included conversion plugins for scaling images in EP3, for example the
PDF preview image that pops up when you hover over the PDF icon is generated by a PDF-to-thumbnail conversion plugin. By the same token, the EP2 cover image code above can be re-packaged as an EPrints 3 conversion plugin. We are also planning some format conversion plugins such as Microsoft Word to PDF.
There are many PDF manipulation tools available (including Acrobat) - I see your requirements being met by a PDF-to-"SpecialPDF" conversion plugin which utilises one or more of these tools (or other conversion plugins!) to produce a PDF that includes a cover note, header/footer and page numbers. This conversion could, for example, be carried out at the editorial review stage, so that the editor can verify that the conversion is satisfactory. Alternatively the conversion could be carried out automatically for every PDF submitted to the archive without user/editor intervention.
If you have not had a chance to look at EPrints 3 yet, there is a
demonstration site available which allows you explore the new features.
Q Please direct me to other online journals that use EPrints (if any).
A May I direct you to the
Journals section of our Example EPrints Repositories page.
The EPrints team has an long term association with
BBSPrints and
Psycoloquy (both journals have been edited by Stevan Harnad, the founder of the original EPrints project).
Some additional
EPrints-based journal repositories are listed on ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories).
