Handbook

EPrints Handbook
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A Guide to Starting Self-Archiving

Before Depositing Your First EPrint
Logging on for the first time and registering as a new user
Adding an EPrint
Keeping your publication record up to date
Metadata
The importance of accurate records
Behind the Scenes
What happens to an EPrint once you have deposited it?
Editing EPrints
Making corrections, adding published versions

A Guide to Self-Archiving and Open Access

Overview and Glossary
The who, what, where, when and why of self-archiving and open access, plus explanations of the importance of research access and impact.
Objections to Self-Archiving
A discussion of some common worries and prejudices that many academics hold about self-archiving.
Achieving Open Access through Self-Archiving
The Road to Open Access, including the roles of the various stakeholders.

Managing an EPrints Service

Installing an EPrints Server

Before Depositing Your First Article

To search or browse an EPrint archive is similar to using any other kind of digital library or search engine. If you are in the position of wanting to deposit an article that you have written, then you are beginning a more unfamiliar task. Digital libraries take their articles from publishers, and so after having provided your content to the Editorial Board of a journal or the Program Committee of a conference, the matter of dissemination is all but invisible to you. Search engines such as Google operate by stealth: they appropriate copies of your Web pages for indexing purposes without your active co-operation.

Eprint archiving is different in that it is performed by the author of the material (or one of the authors) and hence is often referred to as 'self-archiving'. This is an important point - no-one is stealing your work or selling it. You are making it freely available to everyone who has an interest in it. The whole purpose of self-archiving your eprints (eprint: any electronic version of an article before or after its publication to increase the number of people who have an opportunity to read them and cite them. If making your work freely available to the maximum number of readers is not your best interests, then you should not be self-archiving. Those whose interests are served by self-archiving are researchers and scholars (unless bound by defence or commercial restrictions) whose careers depend on research impact, that is, the number of people who are demonstrably influenced by their work.

In order to deposit eprints in the archive you must enter your personal User Area. (This is a web page that contains options for depositing and modifying your eprints.) If you haven't yet been asigned a user area, you must first register with the archive.

The following steps are explained in greater detail below:

Either click on the button
or click on the button
1. Choose a name and password to use on the archive
2. Wait for a registration email to be sent to you
3. Activate your account by clicking on the link in the email
4. Return to the archive and click on the button again.

Click on the User Area in the navigation bar at the top right of the home page. In an unmodified EPrints installation it looks like this:

You will be asked for a login name and password to identify yourself. Not everyone who uses the archive is allowed to deposit eprints, so you will need to become a registered user, with a login name and password. It is possible that all the members of your institution have been pre-registered with login names and passwords that match those in use for other institutional services (such as PC logins). If not, you will have to register yourself.

Registering

If you fail to type in a valid login name and password, you will be taken to a page that invites you to register. Fill out the form as below, indicating your current email address as well as the login name and password that you want to use for this archive.

When you press the Submit button, the archive will send a message to the email address you gave. In it there is a Web link that you should click on (or cut and paste into a Web browser if your Email program doesn't turn URLs into clickable links). This will validate new account, after which you will be allowed to log into the User Area with the new name and password.

From: "Test Archive" <maintainer@research.soton.ac.uk> Date: Mon May 12, 2003 02:59:33 Europe/London To: "John User" <J.User@research.soton.ac.uk> Subject: Test Archive: Account Dear User, Thank you for your interest in Test Archive. You now need to activate your new password, using the following URL: http://research.eprints.org/perl/confirm?userid=... ^-- !CLICK THERE! --^ Before you can start uploading items, you need to fill out some personal details into the form at the following web site: http://research.eprints.org/perl/users/record After you've successfully filled out that form, you can deposit items at the following Web address: http://research.eprints.org/perl/users/home

After you have clicked on the URL, you will get a Web page which confirms that the account and password have been made (in fact it tells you that the account change has been made, which is a bit confusing and will be corrected in a new version of the software) and invites you to log into your user area.

Changing Your User Record

The first time you log on, the only option you will see is a link to View/Change Your User Record on that will present you with a form which you can fill in with information about yourself (name, email, postal address etc. You should fill in at least your name. You can also change your password with this form if you wish. If you want to keep your current password, leave that field blank.

Once you submit this form (click on the Update Record at the foot of the page) you will be returned to your User Area with the full set of options.