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

What Skills Do You Need To Install The Software?

It is important to realise that an EPrints archive is a chimera - two dissimilar things unnaturally joined together. It is partly a database (handled by a genuine Relational Database Management System called mysql) and partly a web site (handled by a web server called apache). These two parts are yoked together by a collection of scripts (programs written in a programming language called Perl). Some of these scripts have to be run by the archive administrator from the command line, and some are invoked by the Web server in response to one of the users clicking on a link or submitting a form. Whichever way this happens, the effect is to update information in the database or to extract information to show in the Web site.

There are two types of information which the archive needs to store - information about the individual eprints themselves (which is stored in the database, as you might expect) and information about the archive's configuration (stored in separate configuration files in XML format)..

The Components of An EPrints Archive

Obviously the archive will be running on a particular kind of computer system - probably Linux on an Intel PC, but Mac OS-X on an Apple or SunOS on a SPARC are also used - and so an archive administrator has to have expertise (or access to someone who has expertise) in four different technical skills: apache, mysql, Perl, XML as well as administering the computer and compiling and installing new programs. In subsequent parts of the manual we will emphasise which part of the system is involved with which functions.