E‐prints and the Open Archives Initiative

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.