What is the best free online document management for academic use?

May 13, 2009 8:54 AM

What is the best free online document management solution with the intended use by a few individuals for academic purposes?

A few of my friends and I trade academic papers via USB drives right now, but we'd like to move to an online solution. More precisely, a private (user:password) CMS driven solution run on a personal webhost.

In some ways something like a private version of Scribd is what we're looking for. We want it to be able to search all the PDF files (they're already OCR) that we upload from within the site, if possible.

Automated organization is a must, and simple upload also. Currently I've got three gigabytes of just text PDFs and don't want to spend much time uploading them. They're already organized systematically according to file name.

Leaving comments on them and such is hoped for and it will eventually have a wiki to share updated information. Also, it has to be open-source/freeware.

Thanks for the assistance.

posted by Outis to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Mendeley?
posted by gene_machine at 9:28 AM on May 13 [1 favorite has favorites]

A joint account for Zotero 1.5, I think can do this.
posted by Midnight Rambler at 10:07 AM on May 13

google documents could do it... docs.google.com
posted by fozzie33 at 10:17 AM on May 13

I've used OWL, an open source document repository in the past for similar.

It has a bulk-load function that allows you to import a ton of documents in the beginning. After that, you upload files one at a time.

There was a full text search that scanned through new documents as they were uploaded.

It has a lot more functionality than you need, but it may work for you.
posted by mattybonez at 10:33 AM on May 13

Mendeley is alright, I've got an account already. However, it's a more public than I'd like. Zotero requires a Firefox extension which isn't friendly and it's more of a citation software. Google Docs doesn't work well because of the file size restrictions. No PDF files greater than 10MB.

Even a Wordpress + CMS config + document handler plugin would be okay if someone had a decent suggestion.
posted by Outis at 10:36 AM on May 13

It looks like OWL is working on their website (porting to Joomla), so you may have better luck from the sourceforge project page.
posted by mattybonez at 10:37 AM on May 13

Alfresco's community edition is very slick. It may be overkill for your needs, but if you have a 3GB pile of PDF's, you may need the extra horsepower.
posted by jenkinsEar at 12:01 PM on May 13

Oh man, thanks so much for the Owl suggestion. That package is insane in the number of features. It looks like it might have a steep learning curve and setup but that's fine with me. It's just plain awesome. I'm such a nerd. I won't have time for this project until the end of the summer but by then they'll have released some new features/stability and I'll have come up with a css template that'll suit my needs.
posted by Outis at 7:43 PM on May 13