The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative

Abstract

The Open Archives initiative (OAi) promotes and encourages the development of author self-archiving solutions (also commonly called e-print systems) through the development of technical mechanisms and organizational structures to support interoperability of e-print archives. Such interoperability can stimulate the transition of e-print systems into genuine building blocks of a transformed scholarly communication model. This paper describes the Santa Fe Convention of the OAi. This is a set of relatively simple but potentially quite powerful interoperability agreements that facilitate the creation of mediator services. These services combine and process information from individual archives and offer increased functionality to support discovery, presentation and analysis of data originating from compliant archives.