Is your academic publications list on the web? Is it up to date and easy to maintain? Can readers easily download papers you’ve authored? One of the goals of open access is to make it easier for people to access publicly-funded research. PublicationsList.org enables researchers to maintain a reliable, professional looking, web-based listing of their academic publication record. Each record can be linked to an offsite, self-archived PDF of the paper or, for a fee, hosted onsite. People will only cite your papers if they can find and read them, and PublicationsList.org makes it easy for people to find, read and import citation details of your work.

Registration is simple, requiring only an email address, your name as it appears on your publications and a password. You then are asked to choose a user name for your list, either one suggested or one you enter on your own. This user name serves as the URL for your publications list:

You’re then taken to your publications page, where you can perform a number of tasks: add a paper, preview your publications page, publish your publications page, edit author details, edit your account information or logout:

You can add a paper manually by entering the details or you can import citations from a variety of formats. PubMed users can lookup publications on PubMed using an integrated search page (linked to from further down on your publications page) and import selected papers. In my case, the integrated PubMed search found all of my journal publications, so I clicked on the “select all” link (each publication can also be selected individually) and then clicked “Add selected items to your publications list”.

Tags and Authors are automatically associated with each publication:

I then manually added two book chapters by choosing “Add a paper” from the menu at the top of my publications page. There are a variety of publication types that can be added manually:

• Journal article
• Article in conference proceedings
• Book chapter with title
• Book
• Book chapter / section / page range
• Booklet
• Manual — technical documentation
• PhD thesis
• Masters thesis
• Technical report
• Entire conference proceedings
• Other

If you want to link your references to PDFs, you’ll either have to upload them to your own server and input the address for each record or upgrade your PublicationsList.org account to a professional subscription. An option is also available for linking to an HTML version of each record.

Although the standard features of PublicationsList.org are free, a Professional subscription, which costs approximately $20 USD or 15 Euro per year, includes additional features: 500 MB of online hosting space for self-archiving full text PDFs of papers, the ability to embed the publications list in your personal or department web page, software updates and email support. Discounts are available for 3 years or for groups. Research students can upgrade to the professional version free of charge, host up to 5 full text papers on PublicationsList.org and embed the list in their own web sites.

The result is a professional looking, web-based publication record:

When you publish your record on PublicationsList.org, you’ll be taken to a page that includes an HTML link to your publications list:

Walter Jessen – publications list

There’s also version for including a button link to your page:

There are a number of the things I like about PublicationsList.org. One is that you can set up quarterly email reminders if you haven’t updated your publications list. Another is that you can receive email alerts of PubMed searches. This feature allows PublicationsList.org to alert you when new publications of yours have been updated on PubMed. You’ll never have to worry about forgetting to update your publications list again!