Crystal ball
And once again, my shiny crystal ball peering into the future turns up… existing reality.
A fellow librarian was kind enough to point out that New York is already working on a multi-institution repository. Well, good for them; I approve of that and expect we’ll see more of it.
Eh, well, I suppose it’s good that my crystal ball isn’t flat-out wrong about these things.
I think possibly the other end-run around annoying journal restrictions is creating OAIster-ish research aggregators that themselves are discipline-specific. That’ll take work; we don’t yet have enough disciplinary-descriptive vocabulary or authority control in place to find appropriate pieces automagically. But it’d give us the best of both worlds: authors can deposit in their local institution (getting whatever production and metadata help they need to do so), with the assurance that their work will be indexed in the discipline-specific repository that they as researchers consult. Worth a try, anyway.