Article,
E-prints and the Open Archives Initiative
Library Hi Tech, 21 (2): 151--158 (June 2003)
DOI: 10.1108/07378830310479794
Abstract
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was created as a practical way to promote interoperability between e-print repositories. Although the scope of the OAI has been broadened, e-print repositories still represent a significant fraction of OAI data providers. This article presents a brief survey of OAI e-print repositories, and of services using metadata harvested from e-print repositories using the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH). It then discusses several situations where metadata harvesting may be used to further improve the utility of e-print archives as a component of the scholarly communication infrastructure.
