Disciplinary/subject archives vs. Institutional/Organisation/Region based
archives. This is going to be a key challenge now open archives begin
to gain momentum.
For example; we are planning a University-wide eprints archive. I am
concerned that some physicists will want to place their items in both
the university eprints service AND the arXiv physics archive. They may
be required to use the university service, but want to use arXiv as it
is the primary source for their discipline. This is a duplication of
effort and a potential irritation.
Ultimately, of course, I'd hope that disciplinary archives will be
replaced by subject-specific OAI service providers harvesting from the
institutional archives. But there is going to be a very long transition
period in which the solution evolves from our experience.
What I'm asking is; has anyone given consideration to ways of smoothing
over this duplication of effort? Possibly some negotiated automated
process for insitutional archives uploading to the subject archive,
or at least assisting the author in the process.
This isn't the biggest issue, but it'd be good to address it before it
becomes more of a problem.
Christopher Gutteridge
GNU EPrints Head Developer
http://software.eprints.org/
Received on Tue Mar 18 2003 - 15:32:54 GMT