INTRODUCTION

The Internet has made possible to provide free-of-charge online access to all the digital literature that scholars give to the world without expectation of payment, free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. This may include copies of peer-reviewed journal articles, preprints, reports, data sets and all materials useful for further research. According to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, “by "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, [...] or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers” . The costs of providing open access to this literature are far lower than the costs of traditional forms of dissemination , especially through self-archiving, the first recommended strategy for achieving open access.The Open Archives Initiative is devoted to enhance access to self- archiving tools (e-prints open archives) as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Its main activity is to develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content . The most outstanding result by now is the OAI-PMH, the well-known protocol for metadata harvesting. Several software tools for open archives and other e-publishing initiatives have been created on its basis and are interoperable due to their OAI-PMH compliance. The fundamental technological framework and standards are independent both from the type of content offered and from the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials .Nonetheless, most of these OAI-PMH-compliant tools are still not integrated in the provision of information that research organizations and universities make available to their users: students (under-graduated and graduated), researchers, faculties (who are both content producers and consumers). The protocol is simple enough as to encourage its use, but a better integration of open archives with the rest of information resources that are accessible within the same institution could enhance usage and visibility of these publishing tools.This workshop aims to present significant experiences and ideas in the field of integration of information resources and creation of innovative services, using the OAI-PMH for interoperability and integration purposes