DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 Promoting and Supporting Open Archives in Europe: The Open Archives Forum Project Donatella Castelli IEI-CNR

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 General Information EU-IST V Framework Accompanying Measure Partners –UKOLN, University of Bath –IEI-CNR, Pisa –Computing Centre of Humboldt-University, Berlin Commencement date October 2001 Duration 2 years

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 Objective Create a European forum for discussing issues related to the open archives and for disseminating information about the implemented solutions

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 Open Archives Archive repository of digital information Open archive provides a machine interface for making its content available to external services

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Santa Fe (New Mexico) – July 1999 Scientific communities that publish their pre-prints on electronic archives ArXiv (Los Alamos National Laboratory Physics Archive papers, user daily) CogPrints (University of Southampton - papers on Psychology) NCSTRL (University of Cornell - papers on Computer Science from 120 Organisations) NDLTD(electronic theses and dissertations) RePEc (papers on Economics)

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 Santa Fe Meeting objective To explore the co-operation among e-print archives as a way to contribute in a concrete manner to the transformation of the scholarly communication

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 Key Issues To solve the problem of interoperability among the e-prints archives Very simple, low-barrier to entry interface that could shift implementation complexity and operational processing load away from the archives

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 Solution proposed Common Interface Archive 1 Common Interface Archive 2 Archive N Common Interface Data providers Service providers searchbrowse personalised dissemination OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol 6 protocol requests – Get record – Identify – ListIdentifiers – ListMetadataFormats – ListRecords – ListSets HTTP-embedded XML response format

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 OAI compliant data and service providers Around 80 archives have implemented OAI-PHM 8 OAI compliant services already available – Cross-archives search Arc citebaseSearch – Cooperative work support, personalised dissemination Cyclades Torii

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 OAI other comunities Other communities – Libraries – Museums Budapest Open Archives Initiative (Open Society Institute – Soros Foundation)

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 OA-Forum objectives (cont.) Provide a Europe-based forum for discussing and disseminating information about the issues related to the open archives (e-print archives - scholarly community – OAI-PMH, other archives - communities - solutions) Provide experiences exchange channel between projects/communities in Europe Provide a platform for interacting with the international open archive community

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 OA-Forum activities Maintain a Web accessible repository of information and an discussion list about the implementation of open archives in Europe Co-ordinate technical and organisational evaluations of the open archives approaches Organise a series of workshops to share experience and promote good practice Support European liaison with OAI

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002

Partial map of the European activity - OAI United Kingdom and Germany - strong North European Countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands) – good Eastern and Mediterranean countries – few ….. a lot of interest everywhere….

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May st Workshop: participants 80 participants 12 European Countries France, Germany, United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Norway Communities Scientific e-prints, libraries, astrophysical data archives, legal archives, medicine archives, video and multimedia archives

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May st Workshop: Topics Communities and services What communities can benefit from the open archive approach? Which types of services becomes possible? Is OAI-PMH powerful enough to support interoperability among archives of different types? What lessons have been learned by early-adopters of the open archives approach in the context of service provision? Can we extend openness to services? How can this be supported?

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May st Workshop: Topics (cont.) Definition of the key vocabulary –Can we agree on basic terminology? –What are the main concepts that are used in the open archive everyday activity? –Do these concepts differ for different communities? –Are the definitions of these concepts clear? –Can we jointly build a glossary?

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May st Workshop: Topics (cont.) Organizational Issues –What lessons about organizational issues, both barriers to adoption and positive factors, can we learn from early adopters? –Which are the business models adopted? –Are there issues related to subject-based archives as opposed to institutional-based archives? –Can organizations reach consensus on metadata formats?

DLM-Forum - Barcelona, 7-8 May 2002 Next steps Report on the results of the 1st OA-Forum Workshop Expert Review on IPR issues discussion list for non-technical OAI issues – to inform people about our activities and results – to allow them to post issues