News Release

BioMed Central embraces the Open Archives Initiative

Business Announcement

BMC (BioMed Central)

BioMed Central has now implemented support for the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) by providing its metadata (a description of the information within an archive, eg title, authors and abstract of a research article) in standard Dublin Core format XML. This allows any OAI compliant service provider to list BioMed Central content.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is developing uniform standards to allow academic holdings of all kinds to be accessed with ease. The OAI gives technical recommendations for archives that, when implemented, will allow archive metadata to become available via its inclusion in search engines and recommendation services.

The BioMed Central metadata is already being used by a variety of projects such as Cornell University's 'SITE for Science' (part of the NSF National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library).

The support of the OAI is consistent with our policy of promoting wider indexing of BioMed Central's journals. Articles from BioMed Central online journals are already indexed in PubMed and Scirus and are archived at PubMed Central. The British Library has also agreed to archive research from BioMed Central as soon as it has put the necessary technical infrastructure in place.

In the near future, we also plan to release an update to the BioMed Central OAI repository, that will offer a richer choice of metadata formats, and compliance with the recently finalised version 1.1 of the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol.

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For further information on BioMed Central’s support for the OAI visit:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/oai.asp

For further information on the Open Archives Initiative visit:
http://www.openarchives.org/

To read further press releases from BioMed Central visit:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/pr-releases.asp


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