The following is from Peter Suber's Open Access News:
 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_04_29_fosblogarchive.html#5931097067404812219

Kwame van Eijndhoven and Maurits van der Graaf, Inventory study into 
the present type and level of OAI compliant Digital Repository 
activities in the EU, SURF Foundation.  The document is dated March 
2007 but was apparently not released until late April.  
http://www.driver-support.eu/documents/DRIVER%20Inventory%20study%202007.pdf

Excerpt:

    An inventory study into the current type and level of digital 
repository activity in the countries of the European Union has been 
carried out as part of the DRIVER project DRIVER project from June 
2006 until February 2007. The study was carried out by a combination 
of a web survey, publication of results on a wiki and telephone 
interviews. The main results of this inventory study are as follows:
http://www.driver-repository.eu/

    Digital repositories for research output have already been 
established in Europe over the last few years

        * There are an estimated 230 institutions with one or more 
digital repositories for research output in the European Union, of 
which about 50% participated in this study.
        * The situation per country differs:
              o In 7 EU countries there appear to be no research 
institutions with a digital repository for research output.
              o 5 EU countries seem to be in a starting phase, where a 
few institutions have set up such a repository.
              o In 15 EU countries a sizeable proportion of the 
research universities have implemented a digital repository for 
research output: in seven of these countries it is estimated that more 
than half of the research universities have done so.

    These digital repositories contain mostly records related to 
textual materials, covering more than a third of the recent research 
output of the institution....

        * More than half of the respondents gave estimates about the 
coverage of their digital repository:
              o On average, the estimated percentage of academics 
delivering material to the digital repositories is 38%.
              o On average, the estimated percentage of research 
output of 2005 deposited in the digital repositories is 37%....

    The participants in this study were asked various questions about 
their views on the importance of a number of factors with regard to 
the setting up and maintenance of digital repositories. The following 
seven factors came out as the most important: 

        * The increased visibility of academics? publications
        * A simple and user-friendly depositing process
        * A mandatory policy for the depositing of the research output 
by the institute
        * An improvement in the situation with regard to the copyright 
of published materials 
        * Requirements by research funding organisations for the 
depositing of research output in repositories 
        * Awareness campaigns among academics 
        * Interest from decision-makers

    It is clear from this study that digital research repositories are 
already strongly established in Europe. The further deployment and 
development of the digital repositories will follow a two-tier 
approach:

        * Deployment of digital repositories at research institutions 
that do not have one yet.
        * Increasing the coverage of the existing digital repositories 
of published and unpublished textual research output, with a possible 
future expansion of the coverage of digital repositories to other, 
non-textual types of research output (e.g. images, video, and research 
datasets).

    The above-mentioned seven most important factors for developing 
and maintaining digital repositories with research output can be used 
to set a European action agenda, such as envisaged by the DRIVER 
project, in the following way:

       1. Increase the visibility of the research output in the 
digital repositories by improving retrieval via further development of 
search engines and subject indexing.
       2. Harmonise the work processes behind the depositing in order 
to facilitate an increase in the delivery of contents to the digital 
repositories.
       3. Advocacy for mandatory depositing policies: mandatory 
policies for the depositing of research output by the institution and 
- in line with this - requirements by research funding organisations 
for the depositing of research output in repositories, should be 
important goals for advocacy efforts according to the results of this 
study....

Excerpted by Peter Suber, Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_04_29_fosblogarchive.html#5931097067404812219