[This post is the first in a series that serialises the One Repo whitepaper in digestible chunks. Do please weigh in with comments! See also Part 2: the solution]
It was more than twenty years ago that Stevan Harnad published his “subversive proposal” that scholars should make the manuscripts of their publications freely available on the Internet. In the initial version of this proposal, the mechanism was FTP sites, but these were quickly replaced by institutional repositories (IRs), collections of manuscripts generated by all of a university’s authors. Many of these IRs are implemented using well established software packages such as EPrints and DSpace.
The One Repo blog 