Preview of Eprints 3

Steve Hitchcock, EPrints version 3 unwrapped, EPrints Insiders, December 14, 2006.  Excerpt:

...[The Eprints team presented] the unwrapping of EPrints version 3 to a receptive crowd of users and prospective users among the Christmas lights of central London.

We tend to think of repositories as being fairly static, but this view hides a high degree of social interaction which is only going to grow. Repositories will be at the heart of a huge amount of data creation and movement, both into and out of repositories, from data creation services, to user applications like citation managers and discovery services such as OpenURL. In EPrints v3 this movement of data is supported by plug-ins, which are clearly going to have an enormous impact. Plug-in applications are independent of the core EPrints software, and can therefore be written by third-party developers.

With its range of import and export plug-ins already growing, EPrints v3 is taking interoperability, adaptability and ease-of-use to a new level for repositories....

A brand new facility for name authorities that allows author names [demo] and even journal titles [demo] to be autocompleted after a few keystrokes recognises the need is to make fewer demands of users. This approach will be extended with automatic extraction of metadata from uploaded files, due in v3.1....

Overall, the meeting provided constructive feedback that has initiated a new round of requirements gathering, and generally delegates sounded positive about the prospects for the new version.

We have peeked under the Christmas wrappers and seen that EPrints v3 looks exciting. The v3 roadshow moves to San Antonio in January for the full launch.