The Open Archives Initiative has its roots at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce and Herbert Van de Sompel started it in 1999 as a forum aimed at formulating technical solutions to support a transformation of scholarly communication. Its first milestone, resulting from a meeting supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Digital Library Federation and SPARC, was the Santa Fe Convention. The Convention was published early 2000, and specified how electronic preprint repositories could share metadata with third parties, to support the establishment of cross-repository discovery services.

Those specifications were fundamentally revised to become applicable to metadata collections in general, in the first version of the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH v.1.0), which was released as an experimental specification in January of 2001. Meanwhile, the Open Archives Initiative was receiving official support from the Digital Library Federation and the Coalition for Networked Information. Also, Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel had become the driving forces of the Initiative. An extensive period of worldwide experimentation followed the release of the OAI-PMH v.1.0. In the USA, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation provided substantial support for OAI-PMH-related projects. Also, an international technical group, coordinated by Lagoze and Van de Sompel, started working against a self-imposed deadline to release a stable version of the protocol.

Version 2.0 of the OAI-PMH was released 14 days late, mid June 2002. When announcing the release on the CNI list, Clifford Lynch summarized its importance as follows:

I believe that this is going to be a vital component of the digital information infrastructure. (...) I think that this project has been a superb model of how to rapidly develop a robust and stable protocol.

At the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the OAI-PMH will play a fundamental role in the repository architecture that the Library Without Walls Prototyping team is exploring. Usage of the protocol in that architecture will enable a more seamingless integration of internal and external scholarly information resources. Currently, the TRI (Technical Report Interchange) project illustrates how the protocol can be used to share metadata of technical reports amongst several organizations.

Liu, Xiaoming, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, Rong Tang, Mohammed Imran Padshah, George Roncaglia, JoAnne Rocker, Michael Nelson, William von Ofenheim, Richard Luce, Jacqueline Stack, Frances Knudson, Beth Goldsmith, Irma Holtkamp, Miriam Blake, Jack Carter, Mariella Di Giacomo, Major Jerome Nutter, Susan Brown, Ron Montbrand, Sally Landenberger, Kathy Pierson, Vince Duran, Beth Moser. Technical Report Interchange Through Synchronized OAI Caches. Peer reviewed paper accepted for presentation at ECDL 2002 (European Conference on Digital Libraries), Rome, Sept. 16-18, 2002.

Liu, X., K. Maly, M. Zubair, Q. Hong, M. Nelson, F. Knudson, I. Holtkamp Federated Searching Interface Techniques for Heterogeneous OAI Repositories Journal of Digital Information, vol. 2 no. 4, May 2002.

Luce, Richard E.   The Open Archives Initiative: Interoperable, interdisciplinary author self-archiving comes of age. Serials Review and NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group) Conference Proceedings, San Diego, June 22-25 2000.

Luce, Richard E.   The Open Archives Initiative: Forging a Path Toward Interoperable Author Self-Archiving Systems College & Research Libraries News: March 2000, p 184