There has been a lot of discussion about the potential for free access to scholarly documents on the Internet. At the turn of the century, there a major initiatives. These are arXiv, which covers Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science and RePEc, which covers Economics. These initiatives work in very different ways. This paper is the fruit of collaboration between authors working for both initiatives. It therefore reflects the perspective of people working to achieve change, rather than an academic perspective of pure observation. We first introduce both arXiv and RePEc, and then consider future scenarios for disintermediated academic publishing. We then discusses the issue of quality control from an c-print archive point of view. Finally, we review recent efforts to improve the interoperability of e-print archives through the Open Archive Initative (OAI). In particular, we draw on the workshop on OAI and peer review held at CERN in March 2001 to illustrate the level of interest in the OAI protocol as a way to improve scholarly communication on the Internet.