It all started in 2010 when the then PhD student at the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University, Dr. Petr Knoth wanted to collect a large corpus of academic papers to explore related research content. It was a frustrating job as he realised that there not only wasn’t a readily available corpus of all research papers, but that collecting this information for machine processing was particularly difficult. While reading about Open Access, he came up with the idea to create a tool that harvests both metadata and full text from all research repositories on a global scale enabling unrestricted access to all content.