E-LIS. E-prints in Library and Information Science >

About E-LIS

Established in 2003, E-LIS is an international Open Archive for Library and Information Science (LIS). Over 11,500 papers have been archived to date. It is freely accessible, aligned with the Open Access (OA) movement and is a voluntary enterprise. E-LIS has grown to include a team of volunteer editors from 44 countries and support for 22 languages. The development of an international LIS network has been stimulated by the extension of the OA concept to LIS works and facilitated by the dissemination of material within the LIS community. These are some of the reasons for the success of E-LIS.

In a few years, E-LIS has been established as the largest international open repository in the field of library and information science. Searching or browsing E-LIS is a kind of multilingual, multicultural experience, an example of what could be accomplished through open access archives to bring the people of the world together. Because librarians are so involved in open access advocacy, E-LIS is a key to encouraging open access for all repositories, by giving librarians the experience they need to speak with confidence when talking with researchers and open access archives, and the experience to provide the best possible assistance to self-archiving faculty.

The invisibility of scholarship from so-called developing countries, such as African countries or India, was regarded as a fait accompli in the pre-Internet era. Thanks to these projects, authors who contribute to an e-print archive are participating in a global effort by universities, researchers, libraries, publishers, editors, and readers to redefine the mechanisms of scholarly research. This e-print archive makes LIS research more visible, available, and relevant, and increases its visibility, status, and public value.

Copyright is one of the key issues for E-LIS. The submission of documents and their accessibility is not an infringement of copyright. All work in E-LIS remains property of the author. If the document is a preprint, the process is quite straightforward because there are no limits concerning copyright: the author holds the exclusive copyright for the pre-refereed preprints. For the refereed postprint, the issue becomes more complex. The author might have given the rights to, for instance, a publisher. The right to self-archive the refereed postprint is a legal matter because the copyright transfer agreement applies to the text. Most journals permit self-archiving, but it depends on the publisher's copyright policy. Authors can also deposit the postprint inside the archive with restricted access. Some publishers have stated that they grant these rights as a standard procedure. Copyright law gives the creator of copyrighted work exclusive rights, which may be both segmented and transferred to others.

E-LIS has recently migrated to Dspace. AePIC CILEA - Consorzio Interuniversitario Lombardo per L'Elaborazione Automatica who is kindly offering the hosting and technical maintenance of E-LIS pro bono, proposed in 2010 to change from EPrints Software to DSpace due to business and maintenance reasons. The E-LIS Team accepted the proposal and E-LIS was ported from EPrints to DSpace between December 2010 and January 2011 thanks to the excellent work done by Susanna Mornati and Andrea Bollini's team.

E-LIS repository is currently supported by a broader number of institutions like

• CILEA through the AePIC team which is managed by Susanna Mornati and supports E-LIS at technical level since January 2003
• FAO of the United Nations through the FAO AIMS team which is managed by Johannes Keizer and supports E-LIS since 2010 and
• DURASPACE that supports E-LIS since 2011.

More information at Supporting organizations

The editorial work is performed under the management of an executive board that drives the policies, alliances, new actions, collaborations and any topic that is of interest to E-LIS. The executive board is made up of two chief executives, two representatives of the editorial team, two representatives of CIEPI - International Centre for Research in Information Strategy and Development -which is the association created by E-LIS members for representing institutionally the E-LIS interest as a legal entity - and two technical representatives that have deep technical experience on document repositories. In addition to this structure, the advisory board appointed to advise the executive board is formed by institutions and people that support E-LIS.

E-LIS users can both browse (by authors, conferences, countries, journals/books, subjects, titles, years) and search (simple or advanced) the archive. Having browsed/searched the archive, users can then view the metadata associated with a document of interest, and download it if required, if it does not have restricted access.

Authors are invited to collaborate in the growth of this important project, by submitting their works to the E-LIS server, to build up a collection of freely accessible and usable LIS documents, within an internationally compatible OAI system.

We would be very glad if you would collaborate with us in the creation of this open access LIS database by depositing your works in our e-server.

Thank you!

E-LIS Team