> I am an MLIS student at UCLA. I am currently working on a paper on
> institutional repositories. I understand from some of my readings
> that the reality of the institutional repository has moved in another
> direction from the concepts of both the OA model of access and the
> SPARC model of encouraging alternative methods of scholarly
> publication. Will the NIH mandate, if it is signed into law, move the
> institutional repository back to one or both of its prior purposes or
> will those concepts remain just a part of the broader scope of the
> present repositories? I would really appreciate hearing the list
> members' thoughts on this.
It was -- and continues to be -- a mistake that the NIH mandate specifies
PMC as the place to deposit. The way to get maximimum benefit from the
NIH mandate, and to generalize its benefits to all fields and all
institutions, is to specify that the deposit should be in the author's
own Institutional Repository (except in the inceasingly rare case
where the author's institution does not yet have an IR). Then PMC and
any other repository can harvest the metadata (and, if desired, the
deposit itself).