| Home | News | Contact |
 |
|
19th February 2008: Textensor Limited today announced a new service which makes it much easier to discuss, review and index documents online. Visit A.nnotate.com to upload a document in PDF or Word formats, and simply highlight text to attach notes. It runs through a web browser with no software to install. You can share documents with colleagues to let them add their own notes or reply to yours.
A.nnotate.com can also be used for sharing annotations on web pages, by entering the URL directly or with a browser button to take a snapshot. Notes, highlighted text and tags are all added to your private, searchable document index, making it easy to return to the precise place where you've added a note. By letting several users share notes on a single online copy of a document, the service makes reviewing documents and gathering feedback much more efficient than circulating email attachments.
Try it now on this sample PDF document (no registration required) and visit a.nnotate.com to upload your own documents (free trial available).
News - 1st January 2008: Over 3000 researchers have now registered from these organisations and more to host their publications on PublicationsList.org since its launch in April 2007. Browse the author index to see who hosts their publications list on the site, view a sample list or register to try it now and put your own publications list online.
Now there is nothing stopping every researcher having a professional and up-to-date list of their publications on the web.
Edinburgh, Scotland, 23 April 2007: Textensor Limited, an Edinburgh University startup company, today announced 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 But all too often personal web pages are out of date or do not link to full text versions of papers even when they are available.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, launched today at publicationslist.org, 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.
According to Dr Fred Howell, co-founder of Textensor Limited, "Academic home pages can be something of a liability, with old or broken pages and incomplete or outdated information. And anyway, why should academics have to learn to be web developers? We provide a single place to quickly and easily publish the information that matters most to academics - their publications list. It makes it simpler for others to cite their work and boost their impact factor."