In the late 1990s, Herbert Van de Sompel (Ghent University) was working with researchers and librarians at Los Alamos National Laboratory (US) and called a meeting to address difficulties related to interoperability issues of e-print servers and digital repositories.
To address these needs, the Coalition for Networked Information[9] and the Digital Library Federation[10] provided funding to establish an Open Archives Initiative (OAI) secretariat managed by Herbert Van de Sompel and Carl Lagoze.
The OAI held a meeting at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) in September 2000 aimed to improve the interface developed at the Santa Fe Convention.
OAI-PMH version 1.0 was introduced to the public in January 2001 at a workshop in Washington D.C.,[12] and another in February in Berlin, Germany.
[14] From 2001 CERN, and later in collaboration with University of Geneva, has organized bi-annual OAI workshops,[15] which over time have developed to cover most aspects of open science.
Wikimedia uses an OAI-PMH repository to provide feeds of Wikipedia and related site updates for search engines and other bulk analysis/republishing endeavors.
A number of software systems support the OAI-PMH, including Fedora, EThOS from the British Library, GNU EPrints from the University of Southampton, Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project, Desire2Learn, DSpace from MIT, HyperJournal from the University of Pisa, Digibib from Digibis, MyCoRe, Koha, Primo, DigiTool, Rosetta and MetaLib from Ex Libris, ArchivalWare from PTFS, DOOR [22] from the eLab[23] in Lugano, Switzerland, panFMP from the PANGAEA data library,[24] SimpleDL from Roaring Development, and jOAI from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.