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/