.eprints.org sites at Southampton serving Open Archives

About .eprints.org sites at Southampton serving Open Archives

The Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia (IAM) Group at Southampton University is involved in a number of projects that collectively seek to promote the dissemination of eprints, that is, scholarly papers destined for peer review and publication in journals, and other forms of data via services that comply with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The services these projects provide are easy to locate from the generic .eprints.org domain simply by inserting the appropriate prefix for the projects and forums shown below, or just by inserting www. The main page for each site presents a headline banner with links to the other sites.

The primary means for building eprint archives and services is self-archiving by authors in institutionally-managed services or disciplinary archives such as the arXiv physics archives. The principal feature of OAI eprint archives is that they are available to everyone, everywhere, at any time. Compliance with the OAI means that users do not have to locate works in individual archives, but can use universal services, including search and citation services for example, that improve access to works and enhance the impact of research.

This page summarises the purpose and sponsors for each project, forum and significant .eprints.org site, giving an overall impression of the scope of this activity.