Developing and promoting interoperability standards for web content dissemination.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is an organization that developed and promoted interoperability standards to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. Formed in the late 1990s around colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson, and Simeon Warner, OAI coordinated three major specification activities: OAI-PMH (Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), OAI-ORE (Object Reuse and Exchange), and ResourceSync. The initiative built a low-barrier interoperability framework for digital libraries and institutional repositories.