The Open Archives Initiative and its Impact on Universities and Scholarly Publishing

The Open Archives Initiative is hardly 4 years old, yet it has succeeded in making a far-reaching impact on the entire field of scholarly publishing. After a brief overview of the development of the Open Archives Initiative and the charachteristics of the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocoll, the paper will trace the impact of the OAI on the development of institutional repositories, its effect internationally on library and research work in universtiies and research institutions, and reactions to the OAI in the field of scholarly pubication. Finally, a hypothesis will be presented on how the Open Archives Initiative is affecting not only scholarly publishing but is also indicative of changes in the field of research and higher education as a whole and certainly also the tasks of the "digital library" within this context.

Diann Rusch-Feja
International University Bremen
Campus Ring 1
D-26759 Bremen

Tel: +49 421 200 4610
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E-mail: d.ruschfeja@iu-bremen.de