The Open Access Initiative: A New Paradigm for Scholarly Communications

This paper gives an account of the origin and development of the Open Access Initiative (OAI) and the digital technology that enables its existence. The researcher explains the crisis in scholarly communications and how open access (OA) can reform the present system. OA has evolved two systems for delivering research articles: OA archives or repositories and OA journals. They differ in that OA journals conduct peer review and OA archives do not. Discussion focuses on how these two delivery systems work, including such topics as OAI, local institutional repositories, Eprints self-archiving software, cross-archives searching, metadata harvesting, and the individuals who invented OA and organizations that support it.