History

Papercore started in the year 2003 as server for collecting summaries of scientific papers. The server was internal to the independent junior research group lead by Alexander K. Hartmann.

His group was funded by the the Volkswagen foundation. The research group was located at that time at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the the University of Göttingen (Germany). The summaries were mainly written in the course of the meetings of the group's journal club, the file format was LaTeX.

After the collection of summaries grew, it was apparent that a central server would facilitate the maintenance and access of the summaries, superior to just collecting the summaries as latex files. Thus, the first implementation of Papercore, based on Wiki and latex2html, was created by Wolfgang Radenbach, at that time a PhD student in the group.

In 2007, the group moved to the University of Oldenburg and became the Computational Theoretical Physics Group. It became obvious that, since each summary contains a set of standardized entries, like title, authors, reference etc, a database-based implementation is superior to the Wiki-based system. Hence, Stefan Wolfsheimer, also a PhD student of the group, implemented the second version based on MySQL. The database was still internal to the research group and grew steadily, up to about 170 summaries.

Several people from other research groups came to know about the database and asked whether it would be possible to make it publicly available, such that more researchers could profit from it and contribute to it. Since the group-internal infrastructure was not sufficient to allow for this on a larger scale, the Institute for Science Networking (ISN) at the University of Oldenburg was asked in 2009 to create a sophisticated, powerful and safe implementation ready to be used by thousands of users from all over the world.

This latest version was written by Eike Bernhardt, based on the Ruby on Rails web-development framework. Christoph Heinisch, a student in the research group, transferred the summaries from the previous server to the new server.

Papercore was inaugurated on June 2nd 2010 to free and open world-wide access by the president of the University of Oldenburg, Prof. Babette Simon.