As an MBA and DBA Program Coordinator in prior to my Web development career now, I love to spend all my leisure time in reading research papers. I still regularly go to my University’s online library in order to access some of the journals and research papers that I couldn’t find the hard copies in my home country.
It was part of my curiosity to view the Ruby on Rails notes in PDf that brought me to this wePapers. wePapers, designed as a document upload and sharing service for students and educators in a big niche, i.e. education industry, surprised me a lot with the amount and quality of papers available in its platform. It is free to join and open to public now.
After you signing up for wePapers, you’re entitled to upload your paper to the community in a variety of formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, rich or plain text file, or Open Office format, with a maximum file size cap at 50MB each. The robust wePapers uploading interface allowed you to entitle your paper easily, with tag or appropriate category given, help other members to search your paper as easy as possible. On wePapers, you can search or navigate the site for the type of papers you want, via simple keyword search such as paper name, or members, courses name and even with the paper key (wePapers will assign each paper uploaded a unique little ID called paper key). You also can filter the paper you want to search with the language setting. However, it seems that most of the papers available now is in English. For the paper you like, you can add it to favorite, or bookmark it for future references. Perhaps you want a copy, you even can download it to your hard drive or embed it to your blog or Web site. Still, the flexibility is there for the members, you can flag or comment on any shared document you found on wePapers.
wePapers also fully integrate its Q&A section with Yedda. In other words, if you have any question about the paper, you can seek help or the answer through the “Ask the Community” with the collaboration of Yedda platform. However, as far as copyright concern goes, I’d like to see wePapers collapse the “Same Author” sidebar column which I found most of the papers uploaded by members are not the same author that cited in the papers.
wePapers, went live in November 2008. It is created by two Israeli students Hanan Weiskopf and Ehud Zamir with the assistance of Dr. Richard Jaffe, an associate professor at Columbia University.
