As noted by Richard, and amplified by MichaelGeist and Peter Suber - The National Research Council (NRC) of Canada's Senior Executive Committee (SEC) has mandated that effective January 2009, all deposit copies of all peer-reviewed publications (articles,
proceedings, books, book chapters) and technical reports produced by NRC will require deposit in the NRC Publication Archive (known as NPArC).
CISTI has produced a press release providing additional details including some areas of potential exemption:
Wherever possible, NPArC will provide access to the full text of
these publications. NRC's License to Publish (Crown Copyright) will be
updated to declare its intent to deposit the full-text of NRC-authored
publications in NPArC. However, the nature, timing and extent of access
to individual publications depends on a variety of factors, including
agreements with publishers, or in the case of technical reports the
sensitivity or confidentiality of content.
As the architect for the NPArC project, I'm proud to see some movement forward by NRC on the difficult legal and policy issues for this initiative. The technology is one thing, but as has been demonstrated time and again, the true hurdles with institutional repositories are less technical, and more human in origin.
That said... just a bit of the technology/architecture: The NPArC project is intending to piggy-back on our ongoing Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) project that CISTI has been working on for the past while. The TDR is, among other things, CISTI's solution to moving forward with SOA-based article-level content and metadata management. The TDR - based broadly on the OAIS reference model - is intended to handle tens of millions of bibliographic records and articles - and is planned to be CISTI's primary article-level storage and management infrastructure. It's much more than NPArC itself needs - but it's planned that TDR will be supporting a number of other CISTI offerings and services as well.
