The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was created as a practical way to promote interoperability between eprint repositories. Although the scope of the OAI has been broadened, eprint repositories still represent a significant fraction of OAI data providers. In this article I present a brief survey of OAI eprint repositories, and of services using metadata harvested from eprint repositories using the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH). I then discuss several situations where metadata harvesting may be used to further improve the utility of eprint archives as a component of the scholarly communication infrastructure.
@article{arxiv.cs/0307008,
title = {Eprints and the Open Archives Initiative},
author = {Simeon Warner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0307008},
year = {2007}
}