District Architecture for Networked Editions (DAFNE) is a research project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research aiming to develop a prototype of the national infrastructure for electronic publishing in Italy. The project’s initial target concerns the scientific and scholarly production in the human and social sciences. The organizational, legal, technical and business aspects of the entire digital publishing pipeline have been analysed. DAFNE system will support the request-offer chain by promoting the integration between the digital library and the electronic publishing districts. In this paper we present the main results of the project’s first year of activity. First a quick outlook about the actors, objects and services is presented. Then the functional model is examined bringing out the distinction between information content and digital objects. Afterwards the technical model is described. The system has a distributed architecture, which includes three categories of subsystems: Data Providers (i.e. the publishers), Service Providers and External Services. Data and Service Providers interact according to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Finally DAFNE metadata is discussed. Metadata permeates the whole publishing chain and DAFNE metadata set is based on already defined domain-specific metadata vocabularies. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) and Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) are the main reference standards. Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and Open Archival Information System (OAIS) are the two other relevant models which complete DAFNE metadata specification.