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One of the major characteristics of open access repositories is interoperability which allows the different systems used by the repositories to communicate and exchange data.

There are protocols and standards applied by the repositories that provide access to the material and allow the broader research community to find and retrieve information from the repository via multiple search engines and tools.

In 1999 Herbert Van de Sompel, Rick Luce and Paul Ginsparg launched the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) with the mission to develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. This initiative has lead to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) which is now in version 2.0.

OAI-PMH

OAI-PMH is a simple harvesting protocol that allows the exchange of metadata among distributed repositories and facilitates the discovery of digital content. The mechanisms provided by OAI-PMH can be applied to all compliant digital institutions creating a global network of digital academic and research content.

To ensure interoperability OAI-PMH has to be applied two participants:

1. a data provider, to serve as a repository that will provide data accessible to harvesters and
2. a service provider,  to serve as a harvester that will collect metadata from repositories

OAI-PMH is based on the client-server architecture, uses the XML language and is compatible with any networked server. The minimum requirement for a repository to be OAI compliant is that they apply the simple Dublin Core  metadata, which is a set of 15 metadata elements. The OAI protocol supports parallel metadata sets allowing repositories to customize the exposed metadata to their specific needs.

The broad acceptance and use of the OAI protocol by many repositories has lead to the creation of OAIster a service providing access to digital resources by harvesting their descriptive metadata using OAI-PMH.

In Greece http://www.openarchives.gr/ is a search engine of the Greek institutional repositories and archives.

Repository Software

There is a wide variety of open-source platforms that allow the creation and administration of digital collections. Most of them have been developed by Universities. The most popular are:

• EPrints - Developed by the University of Southampton, EPrints is an open-source OAI compatible flexible platform for building high-quality, high-value repositories.
• DSpace - Developed by the MIT Library in collaboration with HP, DSpace captures the data in any format and distributes it over the web. It also indexes and preserves the digital content over the long term.
• Fedora - Developed jointly by Cornell University Information Science and the University of Virginia Library, Fedora provides an open-source repository software and related services for managing and delivering digital content.

Preservation

One of the major benefits of the digital repositories is the accessibility and long-term preservation of the digital content.

The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model addresses a full range of archival preservation functions including ingest, archival storage, data management, access and dissemination.

Many open-source repository platforms such as DSpace use the OAIS Reference Model.