Find out about the people and institutions that support and manage the Open Archives Initiative.


Mission Statement

• The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials. As a result, the Open Archives Initiative is currently an organization and an effort explicitly in transition, and is committed to exploring and enabling this new and broader range of applications. As we gain greater knowledge of the scope of applicability of the underlying technology and standards being developed, and begin to understand the structure and culture of the various adopter communities, we expect that we will have to make continued evolutionary changes to both the mission and organization of the Open Archives Initiative.

Executive Committee

• The OAI Executive Committee manages the operational details of the Initiative under the oversight of the Steering Committee and with the support of the Technical Committee. The Executive Committe is:

Carl Lagoze
Herbert Van de Sompel

Technical Committee

• Technical work on the OAI has been carried out by a set of technical committees, organized for specific purposes such as protocol releases.  These committees evaluate the effectiveness of the OAI interoperability architecture and propose changes and enhancements based on community experience. 

Funding Support

• Support for Open Archives Initiative activities has come from the Digital Library Federation, the Coalition for Networked Information, and from National Science Foundation Grant No. IIS-9817416.