The Open Archives Initiative: Building a Low-Barrier Interoperability FrameworkCarl Lagoze Digital Library Research Group Cornell University Ithaca, NY +1-607-255-6046 [email protected] Herbert Van de Sompel Digital Library Research Group Cornell University Ithaca, NY +1-607-255-3085 [email protected] The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability solutions that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The roots of the OAI lie in the E-Print community. Over the last year its focus has been extended to include all content providers. This paper describes the recent history of the OAI – its origins in promoting E-Prints, the broadening of its focus, the details of its technical standard for metadata harvesting, the applications of this standard, and future plans. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.12 [Software Engineering]: Interoperability – Interface definition languages. General Terms Experimentation, Standardization. Keywords Metadata, Interoperability, Digital Libraries, Protocols. 1. INTRODUCTION In October 1999, a meeting was held in Santa Fe to discuss mechanisms to encourage the development of E-Print solutions. The group at this meeting was united in the belief that the ubiquitous interconnectivity of the Web provides new opportunities for the timely dissemination of scholarly information. The well-known physics archive run by Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos National Laboratory has already radically changed the publishing paradigm in its respective field. Similar efforts planned, or already underway, promise to extend these striking changes to other domains. The result of this meeting was the formation of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and beginning of work on a framework facilitating the federation of content providers on the Web. Since that first meeting, the OAI has undergone a period of intensive development both organizationally and technically. The original focus on E-Prints has broadened to encompass content providers from many domains (with an emphasis on what could be classified “scholarly” publishing), a refined and extensively tested technical framework has been developed, and an organizational structure to support the Initiative has been established. The name Open Archives Initiative reflects the origins of the OAI in the E-Prints community where the term archive is generally accepted as a synonym for a repository of scholarly papers. Members of the archiving profession have justifiably noted the strict definition of an “archive” within their domain; with implications for preservation of long-term value, statutory authorization and institutional policy. The OAI uses the term “archive” in a broader sense: as a repository for stored information. Language and terms are never unambiguous and uncontroversial and the OAI respectfully requests the indulgence of the archiving community with this less constrained use of “archive”. Some explanation of the use of the term “Open” in OAI is also due. Our intention is “open” from the architectural perspective – defining and promoting machine interfaces that facilitate the availability of content from a variety of providers. Openness does not mean “free” or “unlimited” access to the information repositories that conform to the OAI technical framework. Such terms are often used too casually and ignore the fact that monetary cost is not the only type of restriction on use of information – any advocate of “free” information recognize that it is eminently reasonable to restrict denial of service attacks or defamatory misuse of information. This paper documents the development of the Open Archives Initiative and describes the plans for the OAI for the near future. At the time of completion of this paper (May 2001), the OAI has released the technical specifications of its metadata harvesting protocol. The substantial interest in the OAI heretofore indicates that the approach advocated by the OAI – establishing a low-entry and well-defined interoperability framework applicable across domains – may be the appropriate catalyst for the federation of a broad cross-section of content providers. The coming year will indicate whether this is true and whether the technical framework defined by the metadata harvesting protocol is a sufficient Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. JCDL’01, June 24-28, 2001, Roanoke, Virginia, USA. Copyright 2001 ACM 1-58113-345-6/01/0006…$5.00. 54underpinning for the development of usable digital library services. 2. E-PRINT ORIGINS The initial meeting and developments of the Open Archives Initiative are described in detail in an earlier paper [1]. This section summarizes that material from the perspective of current developments and events. The origins of the OAI lie in increasing interest in alternatives to the traditional scholarly publishing paradigm. While there may be disagreements about the nature of what changes need to take place, there is widespread consensus that change, perhaps radical change, is inevitable. There are numerous motivating factors for this change. An increasing number of scholarly disciplines, especially those in the so-called “hard sciences” (e.g., physics, computer science, life sciences), are producing results at an increasingly rapid pace. This velocity of change demands mechanisms for reporting results with lower latency times than the ones experienced in the established journal system. The ubiquity of high-speed networks and personal computing has created further consumer demand for use of the Web for delivery of research results. Finally, the economic model of scholarly publishing has been severely strained by rapidly rising subscription prices and relatively stagnant research library budgets. In some scholarly fields, the development of alternative models for the communication of scholarly results – many in the form of on-line repositories of EPrints – has demonstrated a viable alternative to traditional journal publication. Perhaps the best known of these is the Physics