SciTechSociety: The Birth of the Open Access Movement

"Twelve years ago, on October 21st 1999, Clifford Lynch and Don Waters called to order a meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The organizers, Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce, and Herbert Van de Sompel, had a modest goal: generalize the High Energy Physics preprint archive into a Universal Preprint Service available to any scholarly discipline. (Currently known as arXiv and hosted by Cornell University, the HEP preprint archive was then hosted at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.) This meeting constructed the technical foundation for open access: the Open Archives Initiative and the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). It coined the term repository. (Yes, it was a compromise.) It inspired participants. Some went home and developed OAI-compliant repository software...."