Reason for repositories
I’m so glad I don’t work for journal publishers (the for-profit variety) any more, I couldn’t begin to tell you. They’re smart little buggers, though; I have to give them that. They thought of the logic behind discipline-specific repositories long before I did, and guarded against it. Per Peter Suber:
A more specific reason is that a growing number of journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in institutional but not disciplinary repositories. Even though this is an almost arbitrary distinction, institutions without repositories will leave some of their faculty stranded with no way to provide OA to their work.
Well, doesn’t that just take the biscuit. I didn’t know it, but I surely do believe it. Typical.
Yes, it’s still harder to attract faculty to an IR than it would be to a discipline-specific repository. Just means we have to work harder, that’s all. (The journals obviously think we can’t do it. More fools they.)
I withdraw most of my objections to institutional repositories. I now think everybody ought to have (access to) one. Go ye forth and spawn IRs; let the eventual (inevitable, in my opinion) consolidation thereof take care of itself.