The conference paper will describe the challenges for repositories from a service providers perspective. OAI-PMH and OAI-DC were successful in increasing the number of repositories and the dissemination of their documents in the web. BASE as the biggest OAI-PMH service provider world wide has accompanied this development for more than 10 years, but now the limits of this approach are obvious. Based on the analysis of the provided data formats and the content of more than 3,300 repositories we will illustrate the need for the further development and interoperability of repositories and external services. Data and service providers have to think about improved protocols, extended metadata formats and the increasing number of external linkable data sources, if they want to play a key role for supporting scholarly communication in the future.