Thanks for the comment. The reason we evaluate strictly open source products is twofold. Firstly, we decided early on that we wanted an open source system, hence we evaluated those to see if they met our needs.

Secondly, it is significantly more challenging to evaluate commerical products in a similar fashion. For each of the open source products we mention, we had a fully functional server up and running. I suspect this would have been impossible for commercial products.

I did some research into various commercial based IR solutions, and did not find anything like what Jarrow offers. Digital Commons, Content DM and the like offer some excellent IR features, but are not well optimized for ETD submission. We hope that down the road, someone might write an export filter for Jarrow that allows for Jarrow to be integrated with these systems (this should not be very difficult; Jarrow was designed with this in mind).

To summarize, we believe that Jarrow is a one of a kind product. So far as we know, no other software handles pre-defense and submission.