...[The] move to electronic copies has brought with it some challenges of its own. The biggest headache has to be what to do with them all once they're downloaded. I've seen various approaches, from naming each file with the first two authors and the date and simply dumping them all in a central folder all the way to the other end of the spectrum, which involves simply forgetting where you saved it and downloading it all over again each time you want to read it....
[Desktop searching helped but] didn't solve the organization problem or having multiple copies of the same PDF. What we really needed was obvious —iTunes, but for research papers....
How great would it be if there was an app like iTunes, but for papers? The answer is "insanely great!"
[O]nce Papers knows the address for a given journal, it will fetch the 50 most recent papers published therein, which makes staying abreast like child's play....
Other developers have had similar ideas in the past—iPapers being one, and Yep being another—but none of them in my experience have been as well-rounded or complete....
Comment. Of course full OA solves the problem even better --you only have to run searches or, having run them, organize bookmarks or links rather than articles. But for offline use of OA articles, and emailed copies of non-OA articles, apps like this one will be very useful. So far, however, it's limited to Mac users and papers listed in PubMed.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/21/2007 10:48:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
