The Scholars' Web Sites Project is an open-source tool to build the next generation of web site for scholars. It makes possible highly dynamic, powerful, individual sites for scholars, with customization, personalization, and a simple to use interface that enables all scholars to maintain their individual sites. A suite of powerful tools can facilitate creating, distributing, and preserving knowledge faster and more efficiently than ever before.

For example, scholarly papers uploaded to your site instantly are listed there, are distributed automatically to public indices (RePec, PubMed, Google scholar, SSI, polmeth, SSRN, and more), and also are posted on other relevant Harvard sites (such as the IQSS web site, your academic department's site, and the Office of Scholarly Communication). Your papers and the correct citations then are available for others to download in multiple formats or to subscribe to via RSS feeds.

Use your Scholar site to organize your work, publish news and announcements, presentations, and class materials. Aggregate and post RSS feeds from other sites, and maintain contact with students, colleagues, and collaboratoring peers. With a click customize your site's features, such as adding a secure facility to share private files, messaging, managing to-do lists and calendars, and sharing data and documentation with collaborators prior to public distribution. Establish a dataverse to distribute data or your view of the universe of data, create your own blog, or add new widgets, such as automatic translation, search, and notification tools.

The Scholars' Web Sites Project enables all scholars to have total, password-protected control over the look, feel, and content of their site through one simple interface.

Note: Currently this project is in a beta phase. Development of these features is scheduled for completion in a summer 2009 release.