E-LIS: an Open Archive for Library and Information Science

Since 2003 an international service was started, for the deposit of documents in the Library and Information Science (LIS) domain; its name is  E-LIS. It is the first international e-server in this area; it is a springoff of the RCLIS (Research in Computing, Library and  Information Science) project  <http://rclis.org> and the DoIS  (Documents in Information Science) server <http://dois.mimas.ac.uk/>, promoted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and hosted on machines of the Italian Consorzio Interuniversitario Lombardo per L'Elaborazione Automatica (CILEA). E-LIS is different of similar initiatives in the sense that it is based in the voluntary work of people with different backgrounds and it has a non-comercial orientation, there is neither fuding or interest in to getting a revenue or profit.

E-LIS comes to light in order to further the Open Access philosophy to papers in LIS and related fields. 
It is a free-access international archive, in line with the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) movement  <http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/fosblog.html> and with the Eprints movement  <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/%7Eharnad/Tp/nature4.htm>, and it is based on the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) standards and protocols  <http://www.openarchives.org/> 

E-LIS deploys the GNU Eprints (v2.3.3.) software and is completely built out of free software <http://www.eprints.org/>. The GNU EPrints software was born from an idea by Stevan Harnad,  and is developed at the Electronics and Computer Science  Department of  Southampton University (UK) by Christopher  Gutteridge, with the collaboration of Mike Jewell; the design and development of version 1.0 are by Robert Tansley and go back to 2001. The primary aim of GNU Eprints is to put fulltext documents at the disposal of the LIS community, making them visible, searchable, accessible, retrievable and usable by any potential user who need them for not-for-profit uses. A GNU EPrints server is a particular example of Data Provider provided by the Open Archive Initiative, thought for  deposit or self-archiving of information material in electronic format.  The concept of Open Access, extended to LIS works, and their consequent dissemination within the LIS community is a determinant factor in view of the realization of international LIS networks.  

It is possible to deposit works in any language, although it is necessary to include an abstract and keywords in English, besides that in the language of the document. As for copyright, a suitable page was prepared, with the copyright politics <http://eprints.rclis.org/copyright.html>  and so for the submission policy  <http://eprints.rclis.org/policy.html> . 

In order to get the maximum number of authors on board, the contribution policy is very simple. In a broad sense any document related by topic with LIS and available electronically in any format could be included in the archive. The basic criteria for acceptance is that documents must be relevant to research in LIS fields and they should have the form of a finished document that is ready to enter into a process of scholarly communication. That doesn’t mean there is no an edition procedure to make sure that authors do not submit inappropriate papers. For that E-LIS provides for three levels of user: registered user/author, editor and site manager.

The functioning of an Eprints server is based on author/user registration, as a necessary condition for deposit. A page is available with the instructions (help) <http://eprints.rclis.org/help/> Registered users can deposit documents and enjoy the alerting service. <http://eprints.rclis.org/perl/set_password>  Moreover, it is possible to deposit reserved/restricted access documents, such as documents whose author rights were ceded to the publisher. Each registered author/user has an user workarea where she/he enters metadata and loads her/his own documents in various formats. Data are left in the user workarea until they are submitted to the Editorial Board (submit button)  

Before depositing documents, it should be better to consult by the author the E-LIS classification schema, named JITA Classification Schema:  <http://eprints.rclis.org/JITAschema.html> . It is a very simple classification schema, resulting from the fusion and  rearrangement of the NewsAgentTopic Classification Scheme (maintained by Mike Keen at Aberystwyth, UK, until 31st March 1998) and of the RIS Classification Scheme, conceived originally by Donald Soergel (University of Maryland) for the (now ceased) Review of Information Science.  The schema for E-LIS has (at the moment) only one gerarchical level, with a description for each item, useful in view of deposit.  So the JITA classification scheme is not intended to be a classification of abstract type, but its aim is very pragmatic and is that (typical of OA environments) of presenting the documents deposited in the server for display and retrieval, through the browsing modality, suddivided in broad categories, without worrying too much with details.

The editor validates the documents deposited in the buffer area by the registered users, an as a member of the Editorial Board, is involved in the formal control on metadata. The buffer area is where data (metadata and documents) are moved to under go the validation process. 

Finally, the documents arrive to the actual archive, only after an editor has validated them.   

The site manager has the general control on the overall database and the configuration file. The coordinator coordinates the editors team. Anyway, both of them take care and correct the data and metadata and and encourages to new ones editors to improve the quality and management of E-LIS.

The site is freely accessible by anyone. The possibilities to search in the archive are two: browsing (by subject or year)  or search (simple or advanced). Also, it is possible to see the weekly latest deposited documents from http://eprints.rclis.org/perl/latest . From the retrieved metadata it is possible to reach a remote electronic resource, or to download the document (present in the archive in one or more formats) connected with the metadata, if it is not a reserved access document.   

Authors are invited to collaborate in the growth of this important project, by submitting their works to the E-LIS server, so that a great collection of freely accessible and usable LIS documents can be created, within an international OAI compatible deposit. 

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

You are welcome!   

Antonella De Robbio  
http://eprints.rclis.org  
E-LIS Manager

Imma Subirats Coll
E-LIS Coordinator