The scientific communication is suffering considerable alterations so much in its process as in its structure and philosophy. The open archives and open access initiatives are contributing significantly for the undoing of the traditional model of scientific communication and for the construction of a new disaggregated model and with interoperability, fairer and efficient to
disseminate the research results and like this, the knowledge generated by the scientific communities. However, due to the progresses of the information and communication technologies, not only the structure and the flow of the scientific communication is suffering considerable alterations, as well as the own concept and support of the scientific documents. This has been generating the need of the development of tools to optimize the organization, description, exchange and information retrieval processes, besides the digital preservation, among others. Highlight that the MARC format it has been allowing per decades the
description and the exchange of bibliographical and cataloging registrations to the institutions, favoring the access to the contents informacionais contained in several collections. However, with the exponential growth of information and of the documents generation (above all digital), this has been demanding larger flexibility and interoperability among the several
information systems available. In this scenery, the XML markup language is presented as one of the current developments that has as purpose to facilitate and to optimize the administration, storage and transmission of contents through Internet, it being incorporate for several sections and areas of the knowledge for the handling easiness and operational flexibility. Front to that, an exploratory study of theoretical analysis was accomplished, identifying the adaptation of the MARCXML format in the construction in ways of descriptive representation for information resources in open archives, as a complex and
flexible standard of metadata, that will make possible the interoperability among information systems heterogeneous, besides the access to the information. As result of this research, It's considered that MARCXML is an appropriate format for description of data in a complex structure. It’s ended that the measure that increases the complexity of the documents in the repositories and open archives, plus it’s justified a structure of metadata, as the MARCXML format, that support the description of the pecificities of the informational resources, once this initiative is not and nor it will be if restricting to scientific documents, but expanding the other types of informational resources more and more complex and specific, also demanding an appropriate description for the specificities of the bibliographical entities