Archive for the 'News' Category

We’re happy to announce that Alyssa Fahringer has joined the Zotero team as our new outreach coordinator. Alyssa is currently a Ph.D. student in George Mason’s Department of History and Art History studying U.S. history, women and gender, and digital history. She has years of experience working closely with university library communities, and of course she’s an active researcher herself. Take it away, Alyssa!

I am excited to begin as the outreach coordinator for Zotero! I have worked as an intern at the Library of Virginia and in the Collections Department of Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh. I have also been employed as a public librarian. When I complete the Ph.D. program I am hoping to work as a digital public historian. My goal as outreach coordinator is to make Zotero more accessible and user-friendly by updating existing documentation, creating new documentation for improved functionalities, and managing Zotero’s social media presence. I am looking forward to working with the Zotero community and increasing public awareness of Zotero.

This position has been filled.

The Zotero project is looking to hire a full-time, contract developer to help extend the Zotero ecosystem. At first you will work primarily on a specific new tool. If all goes well, we’d hope and expect that you’d be interested in remaining a full-time paid member of the Zotero team longer term.

Initially, you’ll be designing and building a pluggable server-side tool to bridge the Zotero API and external services — think IFTTT for research data. You’ll be building both the base program and one or more sample plugins to help guide the tool’s development and serve as examples for other users of the tool.

Beyond the initial contract, you would begin working on other parts of Zotero, with the ability to focus on the things that interested you. That might mean improving the client or website, extending the API, optimizing the cloud infrastructure, or building back-end services to power new features. As part of a small team, you’d have responsibility over core components of the project and the freedom to find creative solutions to challenging problems. Most importantly, you’d participate in a vibrant global open-source community with amazing community developers and passionate users.

The Zotero development team meets periodically in person, but you’ll primarily be working remotely, communicating with Zotero developers and users via chat rooms, forums, mailing lists, and GitHub. Our hours are flexible and variable: we might be debating a feature request at 1 p.m. or deploying a major upgrade at 1 a.m.

Requirements:

• Extensive experience with JavaScript, PHP, and/or Python
• Experience working with and/or developing web APIs (HTTP/REST/JSON)
• Experience with command-line Linux/Unix systems and services
• Comfort using version control (e.g., Git)
• Strong attention to privacy and security issues
• Willingness to participate in an open-source community

Bonus:

• Experience with open-source infrastructure software: MySQL, Memcached, Redis, Node.js, Elasticsearch, Hadoop, or other tools you use to solve difficult problems involving lots of data
• Experience with Amazon Web Services
• Experience building user-friendly front-end software used by many people or the back-end services powering it, or both

Please send a cover letter and résumé, including relevant programming projects and experience, to jobs@zotero.org with subject line “Contract Developer”. We will begin considering applications immediately and continue until the position is filled. Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

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.