I'd be interested to hear how other repository projects came about and about the structure by which they are managed, to compare with our experience. I hope this response is a useful synopsis of ours.
Talat, Here is the story of my repository : a "French side story". I am a French librarian retired (since 2005) from INRA, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research : INRA counts about 4000 researchers working in 160 laboratories. These laboratories are distributed in 21 different centres and organized in 14 different departments. http://www.international.inra.fr/ I worked in a lab of 60 researchers. Since 1995, I have attentively followed the changes in scientific communication provided by Internet, in attending conferences and in reading the limited literature on the subject. I have subscribed to American Scientist Open Access Forum, ("September forum"at this time) since its inception (1998). All this allowed me to become aware of what was approaching in scientific publication and I tried to convince INRA, by different means (reports, web pages, organizing conferences, etc.) to be a pioneer in freeing scientific communication. They could use the two ways of providing Open access (Gold and Green). For example, they edited (and still edit) periodicals that they could have tried to convert to (Gold) Open Access periodicals. Some of my propositions began to gain some credit only in 2004, one year before I retired. When I decided to set up a E-prints repository, for my lab, in 2001, I considered that it would provide a concrete example of what can be done for Open Access at an institutional level and I hoped once again, to succeed in influencing the Head of INRA to consider this (Green) way of providing OA. Our archive was launched in the beginning of 2002 at the same time as other 4 initial E-Prints repositories in France To start my project I first had to convince our computer technician to set up this repository "just for me" (that is, out of an official project). At that time OAI was totally unknown. I explained to him what was behind this standard. He quickly perceived the importance of this project and was interested in it but was very busy and could only work on our unofficial project in his spare time. So the setting up took more time than it should have taken. As soon as the repository was set up , I started to fill it with recent peer reviewed articles, seeking all the green copyright agreements for the publications At that time it was even more difficult to fill an archive. See the ROMEO figures published in my conference for the national commission of UNESCO, in Paris in 2003 [1] When I pre-populated my repository with about eight or ten articles, I decided that it was time to launch it officially. For that I had to inform the hierarchy of INRA of the existence of this archive and to declare it OAI . This bureaucratic part of the establishment of my archive took several months because at an upper level of INRA nobody wanted to assume the responsibility of this archive. Too new, therefore too threatening! Fortunately, when I at last asked the head of my lab, he agreed to assume this responsibility. I am sure that at time he had not totally understood what was at stake but he perceived well that scientific communication was changing and he accepted this challenge without fear concerning a risk of copyright breach. I am grateful for his confidence and support. The name of our repository was initially "Physiologie Animale" but when my head of laboratory became the head of department it took the name of the Department, that is "Animal Physiology and Livestock Systems Archive » See at http://phy043.tours.inra.fr:8080 I have been severely criticized for the low number of articles in my Archives .They said : "You are not credible with this small number of documents" and they were right. But at that time I had my reasons: I could have certainly succeeded to deposit a lot of reports or theses, etc., -- that is, all sort of documents without legal issues - so as to increase the number of documents but I had another goal. I wanted to demonstrate exactly what Open Access really means, and that an archive is provided essentially for depositing a copy of a published article. Nevertheless, I was invited in 2004 to a seminar in la Rochelle, to talk about my "experiment".[2] I explained during that conference that if I can archive 15/20 articles a year from the publications of my lab, the 160 laboratories of the whole of INRA could provide between 2000 /3000 annual open access articles, immediately. Total INRA output is about 6000 articles per year. My idea was that it would have been easy to set up 13 other departmental Eprints archives and to centralize them at a national institutional level. This way has the advantage of emulation among the different departments and the appropriation of a project on the part of the staff in the different libraries. After that we could use our database PRODINRA see http://www.inra.fr/prodinra/pinra/index.xsp to enlarge the archives to older publications and gradually provide 100 000 open acess documents .There are about 100 librarians at INRA to help in this task. I regret that this very simple strategy was not followed at the time. Open Archives are underway now at the institutional level at INRA. PRODINRA should become an Open Archive but unfortunately till today the database is not yet transformed into an institutional open archive, as announced 3 years ago. When I retired, I succeeded in populating the archive with 70 recent published articles . Some of my colleagues have continued digitizing old publications and others continue to provide relatively recent publications of her lab. After my retierement I succeeded in convincing the head of Information of INRA to study the possibility of a Green OA self-archiving mandate at INRA. My colleagues were asked to publish a report on the "Mandate". See this report (in french and english) at http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00115513I I contributed to this report and insisted on the necessity of a mandate for all the metadata (ID/OA). In conlusion , I can say that despite the difficulties of that "heroic" time, I succeed in moving my lab, my department and perhaps my institute toward Open Access. If you are convinced of the importance of your project you will be able to convince all that are around you. I confirm that Arthur Sale patchwork policy is worth to be followed. [1 ]Bosc, H. (2003) Le droit des auteurs à mettre en accès libre leurs propres résultats de recherche. In : Proceedings «Les droits d'auteur et droits voisins dans la société l'information», colloque organisé par la commission nationale française pour l'UNESCO », pages pp. 103-106, Paris. http://cogprints.org/4411/ [2] The video of my conference is at http://openaccess.inist.fr/article.php3?id_article=56 Hélène Bosc Euroscience Member http://www.euroscience.org/ Convenor of the workgroup on scientific publishing http://www.euroscience.org/WGROUPS/SC_PUBLISHING/index.htm