You may or may not know it, but Papers relies on the fantastic styles provided by the Citation Style Language (CSL) repository to support formatting of your manuscript in hundreds of different styles (more than 1700 in Papers 2.1.8). Despite this large choice, your favorite journal may not be listed there. The best way to get this repository to grow further and cover more fields of research is to get more people to contribute new styles.

In a post on our support pages we show you how to create your own CSL style. A few of you have been adventurous enough to give it a try and have produced new CSL styles for their own use. We helped a few of you as well in the process, and for the first time in Papers 2.1.8, have added new styles that were the fruit of that labor. But there were only a handful of these, and we know there must be dozens more out there, ready to be added to the list.

To boost the process, and provide more incentives to the CSL creators out there, we have decided to start a new initiative, “A Serial for a Style”. The idea is very simple: if you create a CSL style and contribute it to the CSL style repository, we’ll give you a free Papers2 serial number. That’s one of the way we also want to give back to the CSL community.

Here are the specific rules:

- The style must be new – not a duplicate of an existing style
- Your name and email must be in the author or contributor field of the style – we want you to take full ownership (with great power, comes great responsibility, yada, yada)
- The style must use the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) – Papers2 needs a commercial-friendly license, and that’s also the most popular license in the repository
- The style must contain a URL that links back to instructions to authors, or some other authoritative document
- The style must have been submitted to the official CSL repository – please follow the [instructions on the CSL wiki](https://github.com/citation-style-language/styles/wiki), as we want you to make it as easy as possible to the CSL folks that maintain the repository. This means among other things that the style needs to be written in valid CSL version 1.0.
- 1 serial maximum awarded per style – thus, only one contributor per style will get the serial

We also recognize some of you might want to contribute more than one style. We also want to encourage that, but we have to be reasonable in the number of serials we can give away, so here is the rule we will apply:

-1 style –> 1 serial
- 5 styles –> 2 serials
- 10 styles –> 3 serials
- 15 styles –> 4 serials
- …_etc_… with each additional 5 styles corresponding to one additional serial

The above rules are informal, not a binding contract. We just make here a promise that we will award the serials based on contributions to the CSL repository. You just have to trust we will honor our promise. In return, please do not abuse the system and the rules. Finally, note that we don’t know yet for how long we will run this initiative: it might be limited in time.

When we launched Papers2 in March we knew we still had quite a bit of ground to cover. In March you saw the results of two years of hard work by an amazing team of people.

Although Papers2 might have looked familiar, it was built completely from scratch.

The reason for doing this was so we would be able to make Papers even better in the future, laying the groundwork for some awesome features like the new annotation support in Papers 2.1 and many others that are still to come. The downside is that some of the Papers1 features you were used to, did not make it for the release deadline in March.

We could not just move around some code to bring all Papers1 features to Papers2. Because we were working from the ground up, the foundation that had to be build to accommodate some technically challenging features was very different from Papers1. You can’t build a Cadillac on the framework for a Beetle, and we could not create the features we wanted on top of the Papers1 foundation.

Although there were some technical challenges to be overcome, we promised it was just a matter of time before we brought back all the Papers1 features to Papers2. We knew the blue search tokens were sorely missed, and when we build unified search we also had to do some more work to bring back the search tokens.

Now, it is time for a new Papers2 experience: Papers 2.1

If you were waiting to switch from Papers1 to Papers2 because you could not imagine your workflow without the blue search tokens, then we’d love to welcome you to a new and improved Papers experience. Searching multiple repositories at once with unified search, and using search tokens to refine your query, guarantees you will find the exact papers you want, faster.

When libraries grow, duplications are a common occurrence. We made it easy to bring organization to your library with author merging in Papers1, and now this feature is back again in Papers2.1. Some Papers1 features are still missing, such as journal merging, papers archives, and recent papers for authors and journals. These are still on their way, and will make their Papers2 debut in Papers2.2. You can stay on top of what is coming next on our roadmap.

Aside from bringing familiar features back, we have worked on expanding the number of features in Papers2.

Annotation support was high on the wish list. If it was on your wish list as well, then Santa came early this year because we’ve made annotations a reality for Papers2.1. Not only can you highlight (in different colors!) and add notes anywhere in the text, but your annotations sync with Papers for iPad and iPhone. We believe highlighting and annotating in Papers should be faster than grabbing a highlighter and taking it to a printed article. That is why any text you select with your mouse while holding the command key is automatically highlighted. You can, but do not have to, right-click to select the “highlight” option. Equally simple is note taking: hold the command key and double click anywhere in the article to add a note.

We could go on and on about all the great features we have brought back, and the new ones we have created, but instead we would like to invite you to testdrive them yourself. Download a free 30-day trial of Papers 2.1.

Enjoy Papers2.1!
the mekentosj team

Academia can be a treacherous environment, but the promise of unexpected discoveries and groundbreaking research make it only ever more exciting.

Usually we know where we can expect complications to come from; contaminated samples, unexpectedly fast grant-proposal deadline, or uncooperative university administrators. However, sometimes the most shocking dangers surface from unexpected places. One such place can be the weight and magnitude of our library. Yes, knowledge does get heavy, and at times too heavy for office furniture.

Here is a picture of one prominent researcher’s desk as he encountered it one fine morning this week, collapsed under the weight of his library of articles.

Pre-Papers2 chaos & destruction

Of course the obvious solution was a Papers2 makeover. Now, office furniture remains in tact, notes can be searched and found within seconds, the library can be shared with colleagues across the hall, and organization prevails.

The Papers2 makeover 'after' picture

The Papers2 release was much anticipated, and without question in great part because of Papers Livfe. With the response to the Papers2 release being even more successful than anticipated, we ran into scaling concerns with Livfe. To ensure all users would have a troublefree experience taking their libraries Livfe, we made the decision to allow access to users in stages, after we made some more adjustments to the system.

Once it became clear we could not open up Livfe right after releasing Papers2, the team worked around the clock to get Livfe ready for the large influx of users. We are thrilled to finally say Livfe is live!

What’s Livfe all about?
If you have not used Livfe yourself yet, you might be wondering what Livfe really is all about. With Papers Livfe, you can create collections of papers you share with colleagues and friends. Collections can also be made public and shared with the world.

Livfe takes collaborations to a whole new level: working on a paper with a colleague across the world? Share a collection of references important for your work. Sharing can also take the shape of journal clubs or study groups, and Livfe is perfect for this as well. Any collection can become a Livfe collection and shared with any other Papers2 user. Through reviews and comments you can share your thoughts about each article with the other members of your collection.

How Livfe helps you share
Using Papers Livfe you share collections, and your personal reviews for the articles in your collection, with other Papers Livfe users. One central question users have been asking us is whether the PDF files associated with your library entries are shared. Unfortunately, there is no way we can share PDF files through Livfe for copyright reasons. What is shared in Livfe is the metadata for all the articles in your Livfe collection. Other members of your collection are lead to the publishers website to import the PDF themselves.

Our Livfe introduction
Livfe speaks for itself, and doesn’t need too much of an introduction, but we’ve created one anyways.
Enjoy Livfe!
the Mekentosj team

Check out our growing Livfe FAQ and upcoming tutorials. Still have questions about Livfe? Make use of our support system to ask us.

We would love to hear how you are using Papers Livfe in the comments