SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) is an interoperability standard that allows digital repositories to accept the deposit of content from multiple sources in different formats (such as XML documents) via a standardized protocol.
SWORD is a profile (specialism) of the Atom Publishing Protocol, but restricts itself solely to the scope of depositing resources into scholarly systems.
The first version of the SWORD protocol was created in 2007 by a consortium of UK institutional repository experts.
Between the original release in 2007, two subsequent projects were undertaken until 2009 to further refine the version 1.0 specification and perform advocacy work.
"[4] In 2011 a new project began to extend the "fire and forget" approach of the SWORD 1.x specification into a full CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) interface, and the result was a new version (designated 2.0).