Is the Open Archives Initiative only about E-Prints?
The roots of the OAI lie in the E-Print community, which promotes and maintains web-accessible archives of scholarly papers as a means of increasing access to scholarly research. Initial work in the OAI was motivated by a desire to develop interoperability frameworks for federating E-Print archives. It soon became evident, however, that the concepts in the OAI interoperability framework – exposing multiple forms of metadata through a harvesting protocol – had applications beyond the E-Print community. Therefore, the OAI has adopted a mission statement with broader application: opening up access to a range of digital materials. The participants in the OAI have an ongoing interest in publishing alternatives of interest to a variety of stakeholders – E-Print providers, publishers, authors – and view the OAI as a forum for discussions and experimentation with those alternatives.
The roots of the OAI lie in the E-Print community. Initial work in the OAI was motivated by a desire to provide interoperability solutions for the E-Print community. It soon became evident, however, that the concepts in the OAI interoperability framework – exposing multiple forms of metadata through a harvesting protocol – had applications beyond the E-Print community. Therefore, the OAI has adopted a mission statement with broader application: opening up access to a range of digital materials. The participants in the OAI have an ongoing interest in publishing alternatives of interest to a variety of stakeholders – E-Print providers, publishers, authors – and view the OAI as a forum for discussions and experimentation with those alternatives.
