Monday, April 23, 2007

Making your OA publications easier to find

PublicationsList is a new tool from Textensor that lets authors make an online linked list of their OA publications. From today's announcement:
PublicationsList.org launched to improve access to self-archived and open-access academic publications
Now there is nothing stopping every researcher having a professional and up-to-date list of their publications on the web.
[PublicationsList is] a new easy-to-use, on-line service designed to let researchers maintain a comprehensive public record of their research output with links to full text versions of papers.
With growing interest in open access journals and institutional repositories, an author's home page still remains the obvious starting point to access their work. But all too often personal web pages are out of date or do not link to full text versions of papers even when they are available.
Textensor's new service...is designed to make the process of maintaining a comprehensive publications list on the web as quick and straightforward as possible. For most researchers this is the single most important aspect of their web presence.
Authors who already have their publications organised in reference management systems can simply upload the file to have them all imported in one go. For biomedical researchers, the system will also accept identifiers from PubMed, the central repository of bioscience papers, then fetch all the required data automatically.
Links can be included to full text versions of each paper and, where the publishers allow it, PDF files can be uploaded directly. This means the service can be used for individual self-archiving although Textensor anticipates that most users will prefer to link out to the various journal websites or institutional repositories where their work is already archived. The system will also host abstracts, keywords, and the author's own notes about their publications. These can be particularly useful, for example to indicate where a more recent publication supersedes an earlier one, or to add links to related work.
The key feature of PublicationsList.org is that it focuses on the requirements of the individual and remains a fixed point as they move between institutions in the course of their career and publish in a range of journals. To this end, it also allows the user to include their contact details and bibliography, and their papers are listed at a straightforward and memorable URL such as "publicationslist.org/albert.einstein". Hosting publications on publicationslist.org is free for research students and there is a low cost subscription for academic staff....
From a post in Open Access News, by Peter Suber.

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