FIGARO and Open Access to electronic information objects

Abstract

The EC-funded FIGARO project is concerned with free access to electronic scientific information in three major respects: it tackles major issues of publication economy by introducing a novel federate business model (this aspect has already been presented by Bas Savenije in Leuven recently), it will implement the OAI-protocol (which of course is useful, but not sufficiently original to merit a separate presentation in this conference), and it is strongly concerned with technical aspects of free access to electronic information objects. While briefly mentioning the two others I will concentrate on this last aspect in my presentation and thus talk about issues such as open, vendor independent document models, identifiers and open linking/pointing techniques as prerequisites for electronic information being freely accessible.