Impact of OAI protocol in Spain, Portugal and Latin America Fernanda Peset 1 , Antonia Ferrer 1 , Tomàs Baiget 2 IDF-Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain {mpesetm, anfersa}@upv.es 2 IDESCAT, Spain baiget@sarenet.es Keywords: Digital Libraries, Open Archives Initiative, Open Access, Spain, Latin America, Portugal, Scientific communication, Indicators 1. Introduction The open access to scientific information is currently some kind of a hot potato in the university and research centres environments (Barrueco & Subirats, 2003). To install an institutional repository is a very attractive matter for not-for-profit institutions because it produces different kind of benefits: development towards new models for scientific communication, offering of information services with an increased value, more visibility for the research results, etc. The experience acquired running an OAI repository (choosing and implementing a software, using standards to be interoperable with other archives and services, learning to be more visible to the Internet search engines, being part of a broader community of users, working towards the semantic web thanks to the introduction of descriptive metadata…) proves to be a forerunner for the introduction of digital libraries (Ferrer, Peset, Moreno & Lloret, 2005). This poster studies the current state of the development of OAI repositories in Spain, Portugal and Latin America with two objectives: -First, to provide a map of the status of all kinds of initiatives OAI; -Second, deepening the search for indicators to measure the data distribution efficiency. Spain, Portugal and Latin America are united by historical, cultural and linguistic ties which make possible to carry out a unique study about OAI. There are relationships between the professional communities which go beyond the simple geographical proximity. Nevertheless the fact that there is no record of the OAI projects it Latin America makes it quite difficult to locate them and to evaluate the open access movement penetration in these geographical areas. 2. Methodology In May 2006 a compilation was made of all the repositories and service providers created and maintained in Spain, Portugal and Latin American countries using ROAR, OpenArchives & OpenDOAR. Data were completed using Oliver & Swain (2006), as well as other sources like the University of Illinois (UIUC), OAIster, SDL: Search Digital Libraries, Public Knowledge Project, Open Archives Harvester, ROAI, REBIUN, E-Ciencia and HOLMES-Descobrindo a Ciência da Informação por você! The results of the analysis were stored in a database and we contacted the people in charge of the projects in order to confirm the data collected. Finally a brief survey was sent to the two most important Spanish mailing lists in the area of Library and Information Science and Open Access, respectively: [Iwetel] & [OS-Repositories]. The survey helped to locate new projects that still were in an initial development stage, as well as to correct some errors in the previous compilation. 3. Results