Humman Ahangar - Professional Assistant, Central Library, South Campus, University of Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir. India

Open Access environment promotes openness and ensures unrestricted access to qualitative research products to a broader audience. The Open access movement gave rise to many associated concepts like open access repositories, Open software, open data, open research, Open archives etc. The concept of open archives/repositories has revolutionized the modern day research arena. The availability of Open archives hosting plethora of peer reviewed research items not only promotes the research activities but also ensures qualitative research owing to accessibility of such research at global level. The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives initiative provides a mechanism to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. The paper aims at exploring and identifying different types of Open archives available in scientific domain at global level and attempts to analyse use of Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) by such archives for retrieval and dissemination of different research products

Open Access, Open Archives, Open Archives Initiatives, Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, Scientific Archives