OAI-PMH Metadata Harvesting: How It Works on ScholarJMS
OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) is a standard protocol that allows academic search engines and databases to automatically harvest your journal's article metadata. ScholarJMS generates a fully compliant OAI-PMH feed for every hosted journal with no configuration required.
What Is OAI-PMH?
OAI-PMH is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Academic harvesters — including BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), OpenDOAR, CORE, and DOAJ — use OAI-PMH to collect metadata from journal repositories without requiring manual exports. Each journal on ScholarJMS has a unique OAI-PMH endpoint that is live as soon as the first article is published.
Your Journal's OAI-PMH Endpoint
The OAI-PMH base URL for your journal is:
Replace yourdomain.com with your journal's domain (custom or ScholarJMS subdomain). You can find the exact endpoint in Journal Settings → Integrations → OAI-PMH.
Supported Verbs
Identify— repository informationListMetadataFormats— supported formatsListSets— journal setsListIdentifiers— all article identifiersListRecords— full metadata recordsGetRecord— single record by identifier
Metadata Formats
oai_dc— Dublin Core (required)oai_jats— JATS XML (if enabled)
Dublin Core is universally supported by harvesters. JATS XML provides richer metadata for harvesters that support it.
Submitting Your OAI-PMH Endpoint to Harvesters
After confirming your endpoint works (use a browser to visit it — you should see an XML response), register with key harvesters:
DOAJ
Enter your OAI-PMH URL in your DOAJ journal dashboard after listing is approved. DOAJ uses it to keep article metadata up to date.
BASE (base-search.net)
Submit your OAI-PMH endpoint via the BASE provider registration form. Indexing typically starts within 2–4 weeks.
CORE (core.ac.uk)
Register your repository at core.ac.uk/data-providers. CORE harvests open access content and makes it available via its API and search.
What Metadata Is Exported?
Each OAI-PMH record includes: article title, abstract, author names and affiliations, keywords, publication date, volume, issue, page range, DOI (if registered), licence information, and the full-text URL. All fields are populated from the article record in ScholarJMS — no manual XML editing is required.
Google Scholar: Google Scholar does not use OAI-PMH. For Google Scholar indexing, ensure each article page includes standard meta tags (citation_title, citation_doi, etc.) — ScholarJMS generates these automatically on article pages. See the Google Scholar indexing documentation for more detail.