Over the past several years there has been a growing dissatisfaction with how the dissemination of scholarly documentation works. This, combined with the new possibilities opened up by the ubiquity of computers and the Internet in higher education and other research-related institutions, has led to an “experimental fumbling”...to find new ways of disseminating scholarly documentation.
I will begin my explorations into this changing landscape by introducing the Open Access-”movement” and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which makes it possible to harvest metadata from many archives into federated services. I will then go on to discuss, based on its usage in the literature, the concept of “overlay” as it relates both to Open Archives and other sources/forms of documentation. A short survey of existing overlay services (or “Service Providers”, as they are known within the OAI-PMH framework) will be given, with an eye to relating them to the previous discussion. Finally an overview of a prototype service provider will be presented. In closing, the suitability of the OAI-PMH, in its current incarnation, as a framework for constructing value-adding overlay services to Open Access repositories will be discussed, along with some suggestions for future work.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/02/2005 09:24:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
