| E-print archive is one of the primary models of the Open Access movement of scholarly communication. It was created in the early years of Internet and was an entirely Internet-based scholarly communication system. It made use of databases to receive and organize preprints and their metadata which were self-archived by their authors, and then put all these material, just as same as they were submitted, on the Internet. All the researchers and masses throughout the world, then, could scan, download, copy and reasonably use them freely. E-print archive availed itself of the open accessed platforms and such characteristics as quickness, interaction, and long-distance transmitting of the Internet to fulfill the scientists' needs for scholarly communication in a rapid and immediate way. Because of the inevitable time-delay before formal publication, journals always brought on obstacles for timely communication between researchers. However, e-print archive could not only override these obstacles, but also improve the academic impacts of the e-prints' authors by promoting the efficiency of delivery and decreasing the economic impediments to access.From the creation to now, the functions of e-print archive have been increased greatly along with the continual amelioration of the abilities of the Internet on information encoding, organizing, and disseminating: (1)The developments of media-processed software and database technologies have made the types and media of e-prints enriched which e-print archive could store, manage, and retrieve. Gradually, e-print archives have been able to receive texts, pictures, audios, videos, and software. And the connotation of 'e-print' has been expanded from preprint to post-print, chapters of book, bibliography, technical report, working paper, standards literature, patent literature, thesis and dissertation, conference paper, almost covering different white and gray literature. (2)The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) was speculated and the networked value-added information services have made great progresses. Both of them have made the data in the e-print archives throughout the world be able to be harvested, divided, and integrated by value-added service-providers, and be used to provide information services such as cross retrieval, automatic citation linking, and permanent preservation. (3)The Internet extended to touch most universities and colleges, providing necessary conditions for academic institutions to build their own e-print archives, and for researchers to convenientlysubmit and access e-prints resources and relative value-added services.All these developments have appended more benefits to e-print archive on the aspects of disclosing, integrating, re-organizing academic information resources, and greatly enhanced the efficiency of accessing and using scientific material. And the beneficial evolution of e-print archive made the value of it almost exceed the definition of networked informal scholarly communication. Firstly, the amplication of the connotation of 'e-print' has been expanded. As a result, there is more self-archived grey literature to be collected and open accessed. Secondly, the harvesting of e-prints' metadata and the improving of value-added services made the resources of individual e-print archive be able to be divided and integrated. Based on the harvested data, information providers have been offering different and specialized information services. Lastly, the emergence of institutional e-print archives has made people begin to regard this system as a perfect ground for their faculty to communicate with outsiders, as a visible demonstration for the institution to show their academic strengths, and as a good position to propagandize their research results. Furthermore, institutional e-print archive also generates new opportunities for applying e-print archive to other fields than scholarly communication. As a pioneered Open Access model of scholarly communication, e-print archive has taken the advantages and certificated the outstanding superiorities of the Internet. In pace with the resolution of the problems about the Internet, and the development of technologies about it, e-print archive will continually be consummated in the future.After the birth of the first e-print archive, many specialists and scholars silently and persistently have contributed all their efforts to the cause, studying, experimenting on different aspects of e-print archive. And now, there are relatively great scale of e-print archives on the America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. In our country, over 10 e-print archives have been set up from 1977 to today. Compared with other countries, the scale is relatively small and coupled with more serious problems: (l)Some managers of e-print archives consider the setup of the networked platform as the whole work needed, and neglecte propagandizing. Unavoidably, they have not yet provided any solutions for quality control, permanent preservation, and intellectual property management. (2)No necessary technical standards and interoperable mechanisms are created and implemented, and no specialized value-added information services based on e-prints are provided. The OpenArchive Initiative (OAI) is even obeyed by none of them. Every e-print archive has been managed r-^cc'Ively. (3) These e-print archives have not attracted much attention from most scientists and the governors of science and technology management. These problems will prejudice the beneficial evolution of e-print archive, but on the other hand, give good reasons for us to study and develop e-print archives with appropriate strategies fitting for the exact situation of our country.The thesis systemically explores the primary functional modules, the information communication model, the directive opinion of e-print archive, and the principles of OAI-based value-added information services; summarizes the fundamental rules for construction and applicates them into the practice of setting up an institutional e-print archive; emphasizes the real significance of developing e-print archive in our country from the needs of accessing scientific information resources and promoting the impact of academic journals around the world, and then provides feasible suggestions for how to boost and use e-print archives in China.There are six parts in this work. Main contents of every part are as followed:Preface Analyses the inevitability of the emergence of e-print archive, and introduces the history of it; explains the theoretical and practical significance of e-print archive, which works on parallel courses, for innovating scholarly communication; enumerates comprehensive research outputs relative to e-print archive published on abroad and at home; and narrates the aims, main contents, methods, and the creative points of this article.Chapter 1 The Fundamental Principles and Communication Model of E-print Archive. In this part, the author explains why translates 'e-print archive' in such a way and defines it; and then, cites arXiv.org as an example to illustrate how to submit, modify, and retrieve an e-print archive; Afterwards, based on the case above and correlative experiences, summarizes the fundamental principles of e-print archive, including the main characteristics about it and its primary functional modules; Finally, discusses the communication model of e-print archive, by analyzing the factors of the communication structure in e-print archive, and comparing with other scholarly communication models.Chapter 2 The Primary Types of E-print Archive and Main Steps for Its Construction. According to the different tasks to be accomplished, the article classifies e-print archive into five types: disciplinary e-print archive, institutionale-print archive, journal e-print archive, specified e-print archive, and personal e-print archive. In this paper, the object of communication, elementary functions and characteristics of every type are discussed. The author also talks over the preparation for building an e-print archive, including introducing the experiences and lessons from CoRR, RePEc, and ePRINTS@GLASGOW; how to stipulate for construction of e-print archive; and how to choose applicable e-print delivery systems; Ultimately, takes the institutional e-print archive which is established by Zope and Fedora as an example to explain the steps of building an e-print archive.Chapter 3 The Collection and Management of Information Resources in E-print Archive. At first, the author describes the directive opinions and superiorities of the communication model of e-print archive, and analyses the complementary functions which e-print archive plays on formal scholarly communication. Whereafter, the thesis explains the four ways of how to construct e-print resources: the choice and usage of sample databases, the cooperation with other information services or academic institutions, the ways of collecting e-prints, and the exploitation of value-added services. Finally, the author inquires into the three difficult issues concerning with the management of e-print archive: for quality control, researchs into the standards, influent factors, and tactics of how to control the qualities of the content of e-prints, the metadata of e-prints, and the access of e-print archive; for the management of intellectual property of e-prints, puts up the investigation results of RoMEO to clarify the real needs of scholars for the open-access papers, contrasts the findings with the factual requirements of laws, commentates the right for publication of e-print, introduces the intellectual metadata scheme of RoMEO, and supplements some suggests for it; for permanent preservation of e-prints, talks about the objects, affected elements, and corresponding countermeasures for realization.Chapter 4 The Development and Usage of the Value-added Services Based on E-print Archive. In the first place, this part introduces the simple history and technical scheme of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) ; and contrasts OAI with Z39.50 and SOAP to show its characteristics in application. Then, the author explains the principles of how to carry out cross retrieval of e-print archives: In the part of theory, explains the main steps -— collection of metadata, disposal of metadata, and design of cross retrieval — in details; In the part of case analysis, presents the practice of ARC; And in the part of problems, not only numerates the different matters met bythe service providers, but gives some feasible proposals. The last portion of this chapter tries to expound how to automatically index and hyper-link citation records: In the part of theory, mainly introduces the principles of indexing and hyper-linking of citation records; In the part of case analysis, illustrates the services of retrieval, hyper-linkage, and statistic analysis supplied by Citebase Search; And in the part of issues, gives some advices for practice.Chapter 5 The Development and Usage of E-print Archive in Our Country. Above all, the author provides some statistics to argue that the scientific and educational information on the Internet have been being diluted and need salvation, and that our scholarly journals are confronting with difficulties to improve their international impacts and need drastic reforms on the mechanism of dissemination. All the purposes of these arguments are illustrating the realistic significance of developing e-print archive in our country. In succession, this chapter introduces the current situation of e-print archives in our country and narrates the problems and the advantages at home; then presents reasonable strategies for the application and development for us, and provides a macroscopical management model to unify all the solutions. Afterwards, the author analyzes the present utilization of e-print archives inside libraries and scholars, gives some suggestions for the usage of e-print resources at two levels—information services and effective reading. Eventually, the dissertation looks forward the forthcoming development of e-print archive in our country, and thinks that the systematic resolution of management issues, the syncretism with main communities of scholarly communication, the deeper study on potential problems of e-print archive, and the application of its primary principles to other information organizing systems will be the leading aspects for further practices and researches.(Diagrams 35, Tablesl9)...
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