J.E. Huizinga, Robert J. Hanisch, H.E. Payne, R.L. Williamson (Space Telescope Science Institute)
Reference URL: http://doright.stsci.edu/Epreps/
Many astronomical journals now make successful use of the WWW to provide faster access to their publications and to provide added functionality like on-line searches and cross-references. For preprints the transition has been less successful. Many astronomical institutions offer their preprint-series in electronic form on the WWW, but the visibility of electronic preprints is very much lower than that of their paper predecessors on the ``new-preprints rack'' in our libraries. Though existing centralised preprint services solved part of this problem, they offer a large heterogeneous volume of preliminary drafts and submitted and accepted papers. Also, because preprints are submitted by the individual authors instead of by their home institutions, preprints have lost their association with well established preprint series, and institutions have lost part of their scientific identity.
We are therefore developing the infrastructure for a distributed electronic preprint service which will provide transparent access to on-line preprint repositories maintained by individual institutions. In addition to basic features such as fielded searches and end-user notification, the service will also provide tracking of publications from their original preprint form to the final publication in the refereed literature, and have entry points at all participating institutions. The service will provide participating institutions with easy to use, Java-based tools to automatically add new preprints to, and manage a browsable and searchable preprint repository.
We invite potential users to our demo to test and comment on the latest versions of these tools and the end-user interfaces.