Community News

Those of you following developments of EPrints may be aware that there has recently been community adoption of minimum viable governance (MVG). A session at Open Repositories 2025 outlined the motivation behind improved software governance and better coordination of EPrints development activities. EPrints community adoption of MVG is intended to improve formal decision making and deliver strategic steering of the software. EPrints is a terrific and highly flexible repository software solution — and we want to promote its wider use and adoption! 

An interim Steering Committee was formed to lay the foundation of this governance framework, and we have now reached a point at which greater community involvement should be invited. There are two principal fora seeking community involvement: 

• Steering Committee: The Steering Committee is responsible for technical oversight, project approval and oversight, policy oversight, etc. of EPrints software. Please note that being a member of this Committee does not necessarily require technical knowledge of EPrints software and, in fact, a diversity of members is necessary to ensure responsible software steering. A mix of organizational users, developers, scholarly communications experts, and so forth is therefore encouraged.

It is anticipated that a sub-group of the Steering Committee will assume responsibility for outreach activities (Outreach Group), such as the new Community website, visibility at relevant conferences and events, promotion of new EPrints features, etc.

• Maintainers: The Maintainers group is principally interested in aspects of EPrints software maintenance. Unlike the Steering Committee, some level of technical knowledge is required to participate — but even limited knowledge can be helpful, so please do not be intimidated from seeking involvement. 

EPrints software is used by organizations across the globe for many different purposes. To ensure optimal community representation, it would be advantageous to invite expressions of interest from our diverse range of EPrints users, wherever you might be located and however you might be using EPrints software! 🙂

Those interested in participating in the Steering Committee or Maintainers can email their intentions to george.macgregor@glasgow.ac.uk (interim Steering Committee member).

John Salter has released an update to the Altmetrics plugin, in line with the API changes which are coming into effect, see https://bazaar.eprints.org for more details.

Further to the recent release of the Meta Tags plugin to support Google Scholar, we have released a minor update, see https://github.com/eprints/metatags

The latest version of EPrints 3.4 has been released, see https://files.eprints.org for more details.

The IRUS service as used by many EPrints installations for statistics gathering is set to retire in April 2026. There are plans to allow OpenAIRE compliant repositories to move over to using a service hosted by OpenAIRE instead. See https://research.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/09/02/preparing-for-changes-to-irus/ for more details.

To improve discovery and indexing by Google Scholar, EPrints now supports Highwire and PRISM metatags. See https://github.com/eprints/metatags for more details.

CoSector have release plugins to support COAR Notify and PCI implementations.
See https://coar-repositories.org/news-updates/coar-notify-now-available-to-eprints-users/

Our first beta of the next major version of EPrints has been released. See https://files.eprints.org for more information.