The International Effort Towards the Creation of an International Repository for Library and Information Science: Breaking Barriers in the Access to Scientific Research

Established in 2003, E-LIS (http://eprints.rclis.org) is an international Open Archive for Library and Information Science (LIS). Over 9,000 papers have been archived to date. It is freely accessible, aligned with the Open Access movement and is a voluntary enterprise. E-LIS has grown to include a team of volunteer editors from 60 countries and support for 22 languages. It accepts published or unpublished documents in scientific or technical areas; authors can self-archive and a proxy service supports depositors. Metadata are set for each document type and are checked in accordance with editorial guidelines set by an international editorial committee and there are agreements with institutions and library associations in various countries. In few years, E-LIS has been established as the largest international open repository in the field of library and information science. Searching or browsing E-LIS is a kind of multilingual, multicultural experience, an example of what could be accomplished through open access archives to bring the peoples of the world together. Because librarians are so involved in open access advocacy, E-LIS is a key to encouraging open access for all repositories, by giving librarians the experience they need to speak with confidence when talking with researchers and open access archives, and the experience to provide the best possible assistance to self-archiving faculty. The mission of E-LIS is to remain international and world-wide: a place where people from all over the world can deposit their documents and contribute to the world-wide dissemination of knowledge: • to improve knowledge of the building and management of open archives working practically in the field within the framework of Open Digital Libraries; • not only to promote open archives in various disciplinary environments, but also to create a valid and credible model in LIS discipline for the building of a world Library and Information Science archive; • to establish a base for communal work between librarians information technology professionals, and to enhance the Open Access movement. The development of an international LIS network has been stimulated by the extension of the Open Access concept to LIS works and facilitated by the dissemination of material within the LIS community. These are some of the reasons for the success of E-LIS as an organizational model, which has been developed within a framework in compliance with OAI, and, exactly for this reason, it can be regarded as a tool for disseminating the OA philosophy. The invisibility of scholarship from countries so-called developing countries, such as African countries or India, was regarded as a fait accompli in the pre-Internet era. Nowadays, the discussion concerning the digital divide, scholars from these countries may disseminate their work via the networked services of digital repositories, such as E-LIS. Thanks to these projects, authors who contribute to an e-print archive are participating in a global effort by universities, researchers, libraries, publishers, editors, and readers to redefine the mechanisms of scholarly research. This e-print archive makes LIS research more visible, available, and relevant, which in turn increases its visibility, status, and public value. In E-LIS papers from 82 countries are currently deposited in 36 languages: Afrikaans, Basque, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Kannada, Malay, Malayalam, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian