I want to keep it all open though so you still 'own' your website, with the option to host at academic.bio (simple s3 static site), download the compiled html/CSS to host yourself, or use the Jekyll theme directly (github.com/academicbio/academic-minima) depending on the level you're comfortable at.
Thoughts and feedback welcome!
PS the next step is allowing quick import of publications. Where would people like to import from? Bibtex? ResearchGate?
Also, you should consider allowing users to just input a DOI and fetch all the metadata yourself from BASE or CrossRef. With the DOI, using a service like https://oadoi.org/ or http://doai.io/ (they may merge to unite dev force in a not so distant future, but both domains will still work) would also allow to link directly to an accessible PDF of the publication.
I don't think supporting ResearchGate or services like that (academia.edu etc) directly would be a good thing. For interoperability, they should allow bibtex export. If they don't, why encourage them to continue locking-in their users?
I would suggest to enable import from ORCID. Seems to be the best initiative around to give a unique identifier to scientists.
Is there an option to import a latex resume to create the website? That would be handy.
I just want to thank you for ShareLatex, I use it for all my academic documents, it's pretty awesome.
As for the import, could you link it to Google Scholar profiles?
Also, do you plan to open source the whole project?
If there's demand for the front-end being open sourced, then yes. I suspect that the people who'd be willing to host the front-end would have an easier time just editing the Jekyll template YAML directly though, which is already open source: https://github.com/academicbio/academic-minima
I recently went through the pain of setting up a simple static website for a math professor[1], and it really is depressing how polarized the options are considering you want the site to be easily editable by the party in question once it's all set up. Either monolithic Wordpress-like engines that are really hard to bend to your will for first-timers (even me, a developer), or FTPing static files to some shady host provider.
The solution I settled on was hosting everything on github.io[2] and teaching the person how to use the GitHub interface sort of like a file browser/editor so they can tweak little things without having to e-mail me.
Anyway my approach seemed to work out, but I would for sure have given this a try first if I knew about it. Congrats on getting it out there!
1. http://piotrkrasonmath.com/ 2. https://github.com/dougkoellmer/piotrkrasonmath.github.io
A feature request I would have if I published open-access papers (and that is fortunately more and more the case) would be to host them on your page.
Maybe that's already possible (i.e. adding static files), then I have nothing to complain. :)
Instead, open access papers should be hosted in open repositories, which are dedicated to the organization and the conservation of scientific documents. I'm of course talking about services that are supported by public institutions, like arXiv, HAL, Zenodo, etc. Not of those made by startups that may one day be bought by Evilseer (such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate).
But my univ gives me an 'OpenScholar' access... (http://theopenscholar.org/) it's like this weird cms that I can't seem to figure out. Here's a question if anyone has experience with OpenScholar: can I somehow insert HTML pages -- that this tool will generate, and screw the OpenScholar system... while using OpenScholar? (because my univ. won't let me simply upload HTML pages, it makes me do everything in OpenScholar)
This is awesome. The resulting web pages are very nice, and the openness is (no lock-in) is really a good thing. Thanks for making this exists!
