Archiving scientific literature : an experience with e-prints archive software

Abstract

The world of academic publishing is undergoing many changes. Paper based publishing is being supplemented by electronic archives. In certain areas, preprint distribution has completely moved away from the paper-based system in to a fully electronic system called eprints, based on open archives. Arxiv.org, hosted by Los Alamos National Laboratory, is considered the premier example of such e-print archives in the area of physics research. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability solutions that facilitate the efficient dissemination of contents amongst the different e-print archives. The e-prints or electronic pre-prints provide an almost wholly automated and highly efficient organizational framework and distribution mechanism, which is web based. E-print software, developed by the electronic and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton (http://www.eprints.org) is one such tool, which helps us to build e-prints archive. In this paper, we have discussed the implementation of this software by archiving couple of papers published in the Journal of Indian Institute of Science.