From: Marcin Wojnarski <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2014 15:07:42 +0200

(press release, apologies for cross-posting)

With the beginning of the new academic year, Paperity, the first
multidisciplinary aggregator of Open Access journals and papers, has
been launched. Paperity will connect authors with readers, boost
dissemination of new discoveries and consolidate academia around open
literature.

Right now, Paperity (http://paperity.org/) includes over 160,000 open
articles, "gold" and "hybrid", from 2,000 scholarly journals, and
growing. The goal of the team is to cover - with the support of
journal editors and publishers - 100% of Open Access literature in 3
years from now. In order to achieve this, Paperity utilizes an
original technology for article indexing, designed by Marcin
Wojnarski, a data geek from Poland and a medalist of the International
Mathematical Olympiad. This technology indexes only true peer-reviewed
scholarly papers and filters out irrelevant entries, which easily make
it into other aggregators and search engines.

The amount of scholarly literature has grown enormously in the last
decades. Successful dissemination became a big issue. New tools are
needed to help readers access vast amounts of literature dispersed all
over the web and to help authors reach their target audience.
Moreover, research is interdisciplinary now and scholars need broad
access to literature from many fields, also from outside of their core
research area. This is the reason why Paperity covers all subjects,
from Sciences, Technology, Medicine, through Social Sciences, to
Humanities and Arts.

- There are lots of great articles out there which report new
significant findings, yet attract no attention, only because they are
hard to find. No more than top 10% of research institutions have good
access to communication channels and can share their findings
efficiently. The remaining 90%, especially authors from developing
countries and early-career researchers, start from a much lower stand
and often stay unnoticed despite high quality of their work – says
Wojnarski. He adds that it is not by accident that Paperity partners
right now with the EU Contest for Young Scientists, the biggest
science fair in Europe. With the help of Paperity, the Contest wants
to improve dissemination of discoveries authored by its participants –
top young talents from all over the continent.

Paperity is the first service of this kind. The most similar existing
website, PubMed Central, aggregates open journals, too, but is limited
to life sciences alone. Another related service, the Directory of Open
Access Journals, does index articles from multiple periodicals and
different disciplines, but does not provide aggregation, only pure
indexing: it shows metadata of articles, but for fulltext access
redirects to external sites. Moreover, both PMC and DOAJ impose strict
technical requirements on participating journals, which limits the
scope of aggregation. Paperity adapts to whatever technology a given
periodical employs.

Paperity website: http://paperity.org/