Stevan Harnad writes > And an author having to import and deposit every one of his own > institutional outputs into his own institutional repository
No this can be partly automated at today's level of technology and data infrastructure. The rest can be done by IR staff. Future scholarly communciation infrastructure could almost fully automate the process. > because it was deposited institution-externally instead of > institutionally is not extra work (for every author, and > institution)? If you require the deposit at the author's IR you will create work for the funders. Funders don't like to mandate extra work for themselves. > Isn't the gist of the OAI concept that central service-providers should > harvest from distributed local content-providers, rather than vice versa? I am not sure if there is an "OAI concept". There is an OAI-PMH protocol, it talks about metadata being harvested from one computer system to another. Whether the first computer or the second computer is a central service provider is of no interest to the protocol. > (Or should everyone be depositing directly in Google, and then harvesting > back?) AFAIK, Google does not accept deposits. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel skype: thomaskrichel