We are glad to announce the general availability of BibBase premium plans and features. BibBase has been a free tool for scientists and researchers for over ten years and our free, no-strings-attached plan is still hugely popular. But the needs of some of our users have outgrown what we have been able to provide for free until now. By introducing paid subscriptions we are able to address these needs in a sustainable way and provide the professional support our customers want. The pricing page lists our premium plans and their features. Here are the highlights. Hosted websites
All plans include a website hosted on bibbase.org for each user who is part of the plan. This addresses a need we have seen where many users don't just need an easy way to list their publications and keep that list up to date, but don't yet have a place to create and host their web page either and are looking for an easy way to create one. To address this need, we are now providing an easy to use website builder designed for scientists. This means that users can create and host their new website right on bibbase.org itself. Our example page was built with this builder and shows how the hosted pages look in practice. It is perhaps needless to say that when using our website builder it is even easier to embed your publications list and keep it up to date. Merging multiple data-sources with deduplication
One of the features our users like most about BibBase is the flexibility it provides regarding the data source to use for one's publications. While originally designed for use with bibtex files, the ability to use Zotero, DBLP, or Mendeley as a data source has shown to be very helpful to many of our users. Especially research groups, departments, and institutes like the option of using Zotero to collaboratively manage their publications, and then use BibBase to display them. However, as these organizations grow in size it has become increasingly clear that it is difficult to get all users in the organization to agree on which mechanism to use for maintaining their publications. It is hence desirable to be able to merge multiple data sources, while still showing the result as one coherent list. This is now enabled by our new Active Data Source feature. Premium users can now specify any number of data sources in their account, freely combining different types: bibtex files hosted on BibBase, bibtex files hosted elsewhere on the web (e.g., on Github), Zotero libraries, groups and collections, DBLP, or Mendeley. BibBase regularly refreshes data from these sources, aggregates them, removes duplicates, and renders the result as one coherent publication list on-demand.
Organizations
To even more directly address the needs of organizations of all sizes, BibBase now has an explicit notion of organizations. The meaning of those is two-fold: on the one hand, BibBase Organizations provide a cost-effectice way to provide a multitude of users with access to our premium features, on the other, they come with additional features that we have found to drastically simplify the management of the publications of a large number of individuals, many of which being co-authors. In working with our beta customers we have found that the ability to aggregate the publications of all individuals in the organization and then filtering back down to only show a subset of all publications is a very powerful mechanism to address their needs while minimizing the effort required of each individual. This helps them to seamlessly create separate publication lists, e.g., by project, by author, by sub-group, or by funding source without any duplication in effort. This is enabled by another new feature: database queries as data source. Furthermore organizations can designate administrators that are able to impersonate users of their organization on the system in order to help individuals and groups maintain their publication sources and pages effectively.
Database queries as data source
In addition to the previously mentioned data sources, premium users can now use the BibBase database directly as a data source. Using our intuitive query-builder, users can specify fine-grained selectors to define subsets of publications from their data sources or our entire database. The results of these queries can be embedded in any web page and even more easily in any website created on BibBase itself, using the website builder described above.
We believe that with these tools at hand prolific scientists and organizations of all sizes will find it surprisingly easy to setup, maintain, and list their publications wherever they need them, presenting the fruit of their labor in the best light possible while saving time and money that is better spent on their real objective: doing research! Curious? Then go ahead and register for a free account or login. You can try out most features before subscribing to a premium plan. If you are an organization and have questions or would like to request a free trial, please reach out any time: sales@bibbase.org.