Introducing The One Repo | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

"You know what’s wrong with scholarly publishing? Wait, scrub that question. We’ll be here all day. Let me jump straight to the chase and tell you the specific problem with scholarly publishing that I’m thinking of. There’s nowhere to go to find all open-access papers, to download their metadata, to access it via an open API, to find out what’s new, to act as a platform for the development of new tools. Yes, there’s PubMed Central, but that’s only for work funded by the NIH. Yes, there’s Google Scholar, but that has no API, and at any moment could go the way of Google Wave and Google Reader when Google loses interest. Instead, we have something like 4000 repositories out there, balkanised by institution, by geographical region, and by subject area. They have different UIs, different underlying data models, different APIs (if any). They’re built on different software platforms. It’s a jungle out there! ... As researchers, we don’t need 4000 repos. You know what we need? One Repo. Hey! That would be a good name for a project!  I’ve mentioned before how awesome and pro-open my employers, Index Data, are. (For those who are not regular readers, I’m a palaeontologist only in my spare time. By day, I’m a software engineer.) Now we’re working on an index of green/gold OA publishing. Metadata of every article across every repository and publisher ..."