No abstract

INGRID GOGOLIN. The State of the Art The Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) is a very important and valid instrument for the indication of quality and importance of research and/or researchers in social sciences. It is a commercial concern, being financed in principle by membership fees gathered from the publishers who are interested in the reputation of their authors. SSCI has formulated very rigid criteria for entrance: all scientific articles in a journal have to be blind reviewed, and a certain number of international citations have to be proved before a journal is accepted for the membership procedures. In fact, the SSCI functions as an instrument for the promotion of research from the English-speaking scientific community, especially that from the USA. This is due to the fact that the number of citations of articles in languages other than English is-not surprisingly-relatively low. Moreover, the traditions of publishing in most European countries are different from those in the Englishspeaking communities. Many journals, for example, do not demand abstracts in

I ntroductionThe Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is a major development embedded in the digital library community to heighten interoperability and provide more targeted access to scholarly electronic full texts. The OAI has been instrumental in developing a Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) which gathers metadata from electronic full-text repositories, indexes it for searching purposes, conducts the search, and provides the metadata in a distinct format as the first step to retrieval of the full texts. To accomplish this, the metadata contained in the headers of HTML and XML documents must be compliant with the defined OAI metadata, namely unqualified Dublin Core metadata in an XML format (header information or in a database that the harvester can process). This establishes the premise that OAI metadata is standardized in its form, yet highly diverse in its content. Because the OAI-PMH allows for the use of parallel metadata sets, additional metadata can exist in the document which can be used as additional selection criteria and for more specific searching, as well as for filtering purposes.This article gives an overview of the development and philosophy of the OAI. Various implementers of the OAI are highlighted and ongoing research in the context of the total digital library research technology is described, followed by a rough sketch of the implications for the scientific community. The conclusion looks at the status of the OAI at the beginning of March 2002 and considers the time frame of the immediate future, as well as the impact of widespread adoption. Developmental overview and contextThe OAI represents the results of three major developments of the 1990s and indeed the OAI has in part gained its orientation

No abstract