The basic premise

OA-RJ started off as a simple “where are you from” and “where can you go” tool, and has grown into something far more useful and middle-wear/infrastructure-ish.

This is the sketch I came up with, to explain my thoughts to my colleagues, and have re-used when talking to others outside Edina:

The basic premise is that the Junction does two broad functions:

• It provides the “Where are you” and “Where can you go” functions as before, which makes it a useful tool for any deposit tools that wish to find a list of possible deposit targets
• It provides a broker which accepts a complete deposit package, examines it for information, and passes it on to the relevant repositories on behalf of the user.

In both cases, OA-RJ needs to determine two things:

1. Where are you from, and
2. Where should you go

I will address both of these more fully in later posts, however the brief summary is thus:

• Where are you from can be derived from a Whois lookup on the clients IP number
• Where should you go is based on the Institution of the depositor (OpenDOAR), the publisher (Romeo) and the funder (Juliet).

The actual deposit also has a few snags, not least of which is that every target repository will need to provide an ID for the broker to use.