The One Repo: background, implementation and call for funding.

"To solve the problem of free access to scholarship, a worldwide network of institutional repositories (IRs) was proposed over twenty years ago. Although somewhere around 4000 IRs now exist, they have not solved the access problem, in part because discovery is so difficult. Indexes such as Google Scholar help, but do not solve the problem. The One Repo (http://onerepo.net/) is an aggregator which will harvest all of the world's IRs (and appropriate subject and government repositories). It aims to make the entire scholarly record available via a Web UI, embeddable widgets and various web-services, as well providing all the data for direct download. It is built from battle-tested components that are in use in high-volume commercial systems. Numerous harvesting methods are used, backed up where necessary by live searches on target systems, with results sorted and deduplicated. The existing One Repo demonstrator combines all components to present a UI that integrates results from a small number of repositories and other sources. We seek charitable funding to rapidly increase coverage. The One Repo represents an opportunity to solve the IR fragmentation problem once and for all, using a technical solution based on proven, scalable technology. It has dramatic implications for scholarship, research and engineering across every field of human endeavour."