Adding An EPrint
Articles go through a development process which provide many opportunities for uploading an eprint. Each article will probably start off as an unpublished preprint which is submitted to a conference or journal for publication. Once it has been through the peer review process and accepted, it will have a number of corrections to be made before the author's final version is produced. This version (known as the postprint) will either be used as "camera ready copy" by the publisher, or be used as the basis of a new version which contains the same content but which has the journal's house style imposed on it. It is the author's postprint which contains the authoritative content and for which all the relevant metadata will be made available. It is common practice to deposit the preprint version at the same time as you submit it to a jornal for review, and to update the metadata and full text once it is accepted for publication. However, some researchers in some communities prefer to withhold the full text until after it has been reviewed.
Once you have logged in to your User Area on the EPrints archive you will be able to deposit an eprint.
| First Time Users | Experienced Users |
|---|---|
| You have a single button labelled Click on it to start the deposit process. | You have a number of buttons to control your existing eprints. Click on the button to start the deposit process. |
| Now fill in the forms that follow to enter the information about the new eprint (see below for more details). You don't have to fill in all of the information for every form immediately. The information from each form is saved into your User Area as soon as you press the button at the bottom of the page. | |
Getting Started
Click on the User Area link in the navigation bar at the top of the page EPrints home page. When challenged, fill in your login name and password. (It is possible that your browser will fill these in for you, having remembered them from a previous login.)
You will be presented with a page containing many options - this is your user area homepage. The top of the list varies depending on whether you are a new user of not. If you are, you will find a single button inviting you to . When you click it you will be taken through a number of pages (see below) which are the steps necessary to deposit a new eprint into the system.
Otherwise, if you are an experienced user (i.e. you have done this at least once before) you may have a number of half-finished deposits in your workspace. These will be listed in a scrolling field, along with a range of buttons inviting you to , or a partially entered eprint, or to create a eprint or an existing one. To create a new eprint record, click on the "New" button and you will be taken through a number of pages which are the steps necessary to deposit a new eprint and its metadata into the system.
NB If your archive is very up-to-date (installed since Jan 2004), the steps which you go through are slightly different and explained in Stages for Adding an EPrint for Version 2.3+.
Step 1: Deposit Type
The first step is to indicate what kind of article you are entering into the system (e.g. a book chapter, conference paper, journal paper or thesis). Choose one of these options from the scrolling list and click on the button. Please note that the kind of article you choose will determine the kinds of metadata that you are expected to fill in on the subsequent pages.
Step 2: Succession/Commentary
This page is trying to find out whether the article you are uploading bears any special relationship to any other eprint in the system. If it is a new version of an existing article (e.g. one with reviewers corrections added) you should enter the id of the old version into the upper box. (The id of an eprint is displayed on its metadata page.)
Some specialised journals have commentary papers which are written about another paper in the archive. This will usually only be the case if the EPrints installation is being used as the infrastructure for one of these journals. For normal institutional or subject-based archives you should ignore this box.
Step 3: Bibliographic Information
This page is where you fill in the real meat of the metadata. There are 22 different categories of information which you can fill in, but each of the boxes has some explanatory text to help you, so it is less complex that it appears. Please note that once you press the button at the foot of the page, the information that you have enetered will be stored in the database (assuming that you have entered the 7 mandatory fields). You can fill in part of the required information and return to this partially-completed deposit with the rest of the information at a later stage.
Step 4: Document Storage Formats
This is where you upload the full text. Clicking on will take you to further pages to describe the uploaded file. You can add as many different formats of the full text as you choose. Please note that the more easily readable formats (HTML, PDF) are preferred.
The first page (Document Information) asks for information about the format and security of the document. The second page (Document Upload) prepares to upload the full text by specifying whether you wish to upload a simple file, ZIP or tar archive from your computer's hard disk, or a document stored on the Web at a particular URL. Clicking on the button takes you to the Document File Upload page where you can either choose the local file from a Choose File dialog box or type the URL of the Web document. Click on the button to store the file on the EPrints server.
You will then be returned to the previous page where you can add as many other files as you wish. Clicking the button indicates that you have uploaded all the files and returns you to the Document Storage Formats page.
Step 5: Deposit Verification
This page shows how the summary page for the eprint will look, and gives a complete listing of all the data that has been entered. At the bottom of the page you should click on the button if everything is satisfactory. Clicking on the button will take you to the previous step. Clicking on the will return you to your home page with the EPrint in your 'workspace' of unfinished deposits.