Use of OAI-PMH

OpenAIRE uses the OAI-PMH v2.0 protocol for harvesting publication metadata.

Metadata Format

OpenAIRE expects metadata to be encoded in the Dublin Core metadata format (metadataPrefix oai_dc). For information on how to use the individual DC fields, please refer to the section “Use of OAI-DC” below.

OpenAIRE OAI Set

For harvesting the records relevant to OpenAIRE, the use of a specific OAI-Set at the local repository is mandatory. The set must have the following characteristics:

setName setSpec
OpenAIRE openaire

Note

A harvester only uses the setSpec value to perform selective harvesting. The letters of the setSpec must be in small caps.

Set content

Publications to be inserted in the OpenAIRE set must conform to at least one of the following criteria:

  • They are available in Open Access (full text with no access restrictions)
  • They are the outcome of a funded research project identified by a project identifier (see below) regardless of their access status (see section below on [[Literature Guidelines: Metadata Field Access Level|Application Profile Field Access Level]]).

Compatibility of aggregators

Besides individual repositories and journals, also aggregators (e.g., on the national level) can become OpenAIRE compatible. In this case, additional provenance information on the original content providers harvested by the aggregator has to be encoded for OpenAIRE. In accordance with the OAI-PMH guidelines, the provenance information has to be provided in the about element of an OAI record, as displayed in the following example:

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 <about>
   <provenance xmlns="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/provenance"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/provenance
   http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/provenance.xsd">
     <originDescription altered="true" harvestDate="2012-09-17T14:58:36Z">
       <baseURL>http://dspace.library.uu.nl:8080/dspace-oai/request</baseURL>
       <identifier>oai:dspace.library.uu.nl:1874/218065</identifier>
       <datestamp>2012-01-19T12:38:56Z</datestamp>
       <metadataNamespace>
         http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/
       </metadataNamespace>
     </originDescription>
   </provenance>
 </about>

Note

It is recommended to consider the section Compatibility of Aggregators under OpenAIRE Guidelines for Institutional and Thematic Repository Managers v4 as well.