Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Firefox Scholar becomes Zotero

Do you remember the software from George Mason University with the working name Firefox Scholar?  It's been renamed Zotero and the public beta is expected to be released this fall.  From the site:  Zotero...

  • captures citation information you want from a web page automatically, without typing or cutting and pasting on your part, and saves this information directly into the correct fields (e.g., author, title, etc.) of your Zotero library
  • lets you store —beyond citations— PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
  • allows you to easily take notes on the research materials you capture
  • makes it easy to organize your research materials in multiple ways, such as folders, saved searches (smart folders), and tags...
  • is free and open source...

Comment.  Zotero's ability to extract citation information from a web page could automate the collection of metadata and lower the already-low hurdle to self-archiving.  It will be very useful to have this power built in to a tool that scholars might already have running on their desktops, embedded in their browser --and even more useful to have it in an open-source tool that could be optimized for self-archiving and integrated with the open-source archiving packages like Eprints and DSpace.