"Papercore" is the name of the globally freely accessible database project developed by the "Computer-Oriented Theoretical Physics" working group at the University of Oldenburg in collaboration with the Institute for Science Networking, an affiliated institute of the university, which has now gone online.
"Papercore" bundles scientific articles and links them together. "The summaries go far beyond abstracts," says project leader Prof Dr Alexander Hartmann. "They should be about 1/10 of the length of the underlying article, compact and detailed enough at the same time. Each summary should contain roughly what you would remember after reading the full article. So you can save a lot of time by reading the summaries instead of the full articles. In this way, we hope to master the ever-growing flood of scientific publications."

Anyone can take part in the database project - worldwide and free of charge: Anyone who has registered for access can read, write and modify summaries in the same way as Wikipedia. Initially, around 200 articles are online - primarily from the field of physics, created in Hartmann's
working group. In the medium term, the database is to be opened up to all subjects.

The creators of Papercore are focussing primarily on publicity and the self-reinforcing effect: "We expect the database to grow quickly," says Hartmann confidently. More and more scientists should learn about the benefits and become active themselves. Papercore will add an important component to the way scientific information is obtained: "The database will thus become an essential tool for efficient scientific information and its networking - and at some point, we hope, a permanent point of contact in the search for compact scientific information."

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