EPrints celebrates its 10th birthday

EPrints, the first software that made it possible for institutions to create repositories in which to self-archive their research papers online, celebrates its 10th birthday next week during Open Access Week.

Open Access Week, which will take place from 18-24 October, is a global event now entering its fourth year. It provides an opportunity for the academic and research community worldwide to showcase the resources and benefits of Open Access (OA), share the year’s new developments with colleagues, and inspire the ever swifter and broader spread of this revolution in the creation and communication of knowledge.

The University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) will also be celebrating EPrints during Open Access Week. ECS has been at the forefront of the OA movement since the early 1990s and was the first institution in the world to adopt an open access mandate (in 2002), requiring its researchers to self-archive all their research online. The School designed EPrints, the first software created for this purpose, which now drives many of the world’s leading institutional repositories and is much emulated by other softwares.

"ECS pioneered the institutional repository, designing the EPrints software as a means of encouraging open access in 1999," said Dr Les Carr, EPrints Technical Director. "Since 2002 when we adopted our own mandate, our repository has grown to over 4000 open access full-text research publications, capturing close to 100 per cent of our annual refereed research output."

In 2005, the School launched EPrints Services to provide training and repository-hosting services for research institutions across the world. "EPrints Services has proved a great success," said Dr Carr, "enabling us to pass on the expertise that we have developed over the years and to help institutions to customise their own OA repositories for their needs."

EPrints is being developed to support emerging Open Data and Open Science agendas through projects funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). ECS researchers, including Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Professor Stevan Harnad, Professor Tony Hey, Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Dr Les Carr, have been at the forefront of designing and advocating these changes in scientific practice and arguing for changes in national and international scientific policies.

During Open Access Week, the EPrints team will showcase the numerous successes made possible by the software over the last 10 years.