Archive for April, 2014

We’re now offering unlimited storage subscriptions! There’s no longer any need to estimate how much storage you’ll need for your research projects in advance. Unlimited storage is priced at just $120 per year, equivalent to only $10 per month.

Current Zotero users can subscribe or upgrade their plans immediately, and further details are available in our storage documentation.

All current individual subscribers to storage plans 25GB and greater have received automatic upgrades to unlimited plans. We’re also offering an extra year of unlimited storage to those large-plan users who paid in the last 90 days. Subscribers to our discontinued 10GB plans have the option of remaining in those subscriptions as long as they desire.

Subscribers can still choose the 2GB and 6GB plans, offered at $20 and $60 per year, respectively.

We’re excited to announce that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded $360,000 to fund two years of research into altmetrics to be conducted at the University of Montreal, Indiana University, and George Mason University. The Zotero project’s first phase of participation will involve the aggregation and delivery of anonymized datasets to allow our research partners in Montreal and Bloomington to compare readership across a range of metrics, including commercial databases, social media, and reference management software. This project’s second phase is even more exciting: Zotero will put into production a preliminary public API that returns anonymous readership counts when fed universal identifiers (e.g. ISBN, DOI), enabling bibliometric research and integration into third-party apps.

Our partners at the University of Montreal, led by Vincent Larivière and Stefanie Haustein, and at Indiana University, led by Cassidy Sugimoto, will analyze the readership data supplied by Zotero and provide feedback regarding its quality to help us refine our aggregation algorithm. The resulting research will improve our understanding of social media’s value in scholarly communication and shed light on the actual meaning of various altmetric scoring systems.

We’re delighted to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $440,000 to fund a two-year collaboration between Penn State and George Mason University to develop and assess new Zotero functionality for tracking, organizing, and archiving scholarly publications.

Key new Zotero features will include:

• Feeds in the Zotero application. Users will be able to add RSS and Atom feeds to track their favorite scholarly journals and easily grab new publications by simply dragging them to their Zotero libraries as desired.
• Integration with institutional repositories. The Zotero team will work with the developers behind Penn State’s ScholarSphere institutional repository (IR) to allow Penn State faculty, students, and staff to deposit self-authored works directly into the IR from Zotero. A pluggable architecture will enable other institutional repositories to establish similar connections with Zotero.

The IR integration will rely on two key new Zotero technologies to be developed under this grant: a push-based API and a standalone service that connects Zotero to other web applications. Working together, these two new features will enable a range of actions in third-party web services triggered by changes in Zotero libraries, much like an IFTTT for Zotero.

The Penn State team will be led by Ellysa Stern Cahoy, an education librarian who has already conducted extensive research into how faculty manage and archive scholarly communication. She will build on her research to assess how this new Zotero functionality helps humanities scholars to refine their research practices.