Information about scientific publications is often maintained by individual researchers. Reference management software such as EndNote and Bibtex help researchers to maintain a personal collection of bibliographic references. (These are typically references to one's own publications and also those that have been read and cited by the researcher in his own work.)
Most researchers and research groups also have the tedious task of maintaining a web page about publications for interested colleagues from other institutes. Typically, personal reference management and the maintenance of web pages is a separate effort: the author of a new publication adds the reference to his own collection, updates his webpage and possible that of his research group. From then on it is waiting for other researchers to discover the newly added publication.
The openacademia system removes the unnecessary duplication of effort involved in maintaining personal references and webpages. It also solves the problem of creating joined publication lists for webpages at the group or institutional level. At the same time it gives a new way of instantly notifying interested peers of new works instead of waiting for them to visit the webpage of the reseacher or the institute.
openacademia is a distributed system on its own. A public openacademia website is available on the Web for general use, i.e. anyone can submit his own publications to this service. openacademia can also be installed at research groups locally in order to collect and manage the shared publication metadata of the group.
The most immediate service of openacademia is the possibility to generate an HTML representation of one's personal collection of publications and publish it on the Web. This requires filling out a single form on the openacademia website, which generates the code (one line of JavaScript!) that needs to be inserted into the body of the homepage. The code inserts the publication list in the page dynamically and thus there is no need to update the page separately if the underlying collection changes. The appearance of the publication list can be customized by choosing from a variety of stylesheets.
For example, on my own homepage, the list of publications is generated this way.
More interestingly, you can also generate an RSS feed from the collection. Adding such an RSS feed to a homepage allows visitors to subscribe to the publication list using any RSS news reader. Whenever a new publication is added, the subscribers of the feed will be notified of this change through their reader (information push).
The RSS feeds of openacademia are RDF-based and can also be consumed by any RDF aware software such as Piggy Bank.
There is also an AJAX based interface for browsing and searching the publication collection. This interface offers a number of visualizations. For example, the important keywords in the titles of publication matching the current query can be viewed as a tagcloud , where the size of the tags shows the importance of the keyword. It is also possible to browse the co-authorship networks of researchers using the same interactive applet used by Flink.
Another interactive visualization shows publication along a timeline that can be scrolled using the mouse (see below). This time-based visualization uses the Timeline widget developed by the SIMILE project.
Keywords or tags can be added to publications using the features of Bibtex or EndNote. The system also extracts keywords automatically from titles of publications. Lastly, openacademia connects to blog search engines in order to import blog comments about publications.
openacademia is built on Sesame and the Elmo API. For more information about openacademia, please see the documentation.
