Stephen Downes, RSS: Grassroots Support Leads to Mass Appeal, Leaning Circuits, June 2004. Downes gives an overview of RSS and then points out the similarities to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) which uses Dublin Core rather than RSS. Excerpt:
The OAI initiative has been widely embraced by the academic community and has supported several spin-offs, the most notable being MIT’s DSpace open archiving service. The Institutional Archives Registry now lists about 180 feeds containing many thousands of academic articles. Another aggregation service, OAIster reports as of this writing to have collected 3,063,884 records from 277 institutions.
It is only a matter of time before the RSS and OAI worlds merge.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
