The goal of BioTorrents is to allow easier and faster exchange of science-related open-access software and datasets.
BioTorrents allows scientists to rapidly share their results, datasets, and software using the popular BitTorrent file sharing technology. (The BioTorrents website)
From Alain Borel (Bibliotheque Scientifique, Lausanne) on the CHMINF Listserv, 1/18/10, in response to the introduction of the subject by Egon Willighagen at Uppsala Univ.:
"The distributed nature of BitTorrents sounds nice (it doesn’t matter that zillions of users start downloading stuff, since they rapidly all become data sources themselves). However, I wonder how the updates will be treated? OAI-PMH feels like a much better protocol from this point of view. Maybe OAI-PMH could be used as a wrapper for publishing and harvesting BitTorrent seeds (one seed par article)?" (A.B.)
From the website:
"The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata. OAI-PMH is a set of six verbs or services that are invoked within HTTP."
"The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata. OAI-PMH is a set of six verbs or services that are invoked within HTTP."
…offering Interoperability through Metadata Exchange