E‐prints, institutional archives, and metadata: disseminating scholarly literature to the masses Available to Purchase

E‐print servers, once the exclusive domain of physicists, have permeated many academic disciplines, and threaten to revolutionize the scholarly publishing industry. This article explores the history and maturation of e‐print servers, institutional archiving, and the role metadata plays in retrieving information from these repositories. The article highlights Project RoMEO and the Metadata Harvesting Protocol of the Open Archives Initiative.