Frequently Asked Questions

• Copyright and License FAQ
• Metadata FAQ
• Searching FAQ
• OAI FAQ

• How much will it cost?

What operating systems can we use?

EPrints should work on any UNIX operating system. We use Redhat Enterprise Linux. It will work on OSX but that takes a bit more effort (although there's a how-to somewhere... link anyone?)

It will not run under Microsoft Windows and we have no plan to change this.

What computer do we need?

Any new PC is easily powerful enough. Suggested minimum spec. for a live service: 1gig RAM, 20gig Harddrive, 1GHz+ processor.

How much will it cost to set up?

Most of the costs are staff time. Equipment costs are a PC, an internet connection and a BACKUP STRATEGY. Please remember to budget for backups.

EPrints, and all the other software required to make it work, are available for no cost. At some point in the future EPrints may offer some pay-services, but the core software will remain zero cost and freely available to all.

See How much will it cost?

How much diskspace will we need?

Proabably about 2 megabytes per eprint. At the time of writing a 120GB drive costs 50 pounds. That drive would hold approximately 60000 eprints.

See also: Detailed disk usage statistics.

Is it possible when depositing a document, to just point to an "alternative location" rather than have the full text copied and held in the eprint archive?

Yes, just don't assign any value to required_formats in ArchiveConfigure?.pm, like so

$c->{required_formats} = [];

If you are doing this it would also be clever to change the ArchiveRender? routines so that on the abstract page "Full text available as" is replaced by "Full text available via <link to alternative location>".

This keeps the key link to follow (to the full text) at the top of the screen.

I need to run apache as a user other than "eprints", what do I do to make EPrints work in this situation?

Example, apache is running as user "apache".

   * Make all the eprints files owned by "apache" instead of "eprints"
   * Edit SystemSettings?.pm to tell eprints to run as user "apache"
   * You'll need to run all command line scripts as user "apache"
   * All eprints cron jobs should be owned by user "apache" 

If you are installing a new copy of eprints, you can specify the user and group to use when you run 'configure'. Do

./configure --help 

for details.

How do I get the body HTML of a page without the template around it?

This is handy for dymnamically linking eprints content into other sites.

For "view" pages you need to add the option include=>1 to the view configuration. This will cause generate_views to make a .include page in addition to the .html page. The .include page will have no template around it.

For dynamic pages, those under /perl/, you can add the cgi parameter mainonly=yes

eg.

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/perl/latest?mainonly=yes

How do I get statistics on number of deposits per month?

This rather grim bit of SQL should work, although datestamp is the last modified date, not the submission OR creation date, it should still give a good indication.

select count(*),year(datestamp), month(datestamp) from archive group by year(datestamp),month(datestamp) order by year(datestamp),month(datestamp);

I\'ve edited the template (or other config file) but nothing seems to have changed - why?

See HowEPrintsGeneratesWebPages