Attributions
Credits, integration boundaries, licenses, and source notes for PaperSkills.
Attributions
PaperSkills combines first-party academic workflow skills with a scenario-first product layer for research users.
This page explains what is first-party, what is inspired by or integrated from other projects, and what license boundaries users should respect.
How PaperSkills Works
PaperSkills has two layers:
- Skill distribution: installable skills, registry metadata, skill packs, and agent-specific setup commands.
- Research scenarios: practical workflows such as topic framing, field entry, literature review, draft review, submission, and paper tracking.
The distribution layer is inspired by AcademicForge-style skill registries and installers. The product experience is intentionally different: PaperSkills starts from the user's research stage instead of asking users to choose from a raw skill catalog.
First-Party Core Skills
The current PaperSkills core repository maintains these first-party skills under paperskills-core:
| Skill | Purpose | License |
|---|---|---|
topic-framing | Turn a broad interest into researchable paper questions. | MIT |
lit-search | Search scholarly literature and organize results. | MIT |
citation-network | Map key papers, authors, themes, and citation relationships. | MIT |
research-gap | Identify credible research gaps and contribution space. | MIT |
abstract | Produce academic abstracts in several formats. | MIT |
peer-review | Simulate academic review and manuscript diagnosis. | MIT |
cite-verify | Check reference accuracy and claim support. | MIT |
journal-match | Recommend target journals and submission fit. | MIT |
paper-tracker | Track new papers by topic, author, venue, or time window. | MIT |
The registry currently marks these skills as MIT-licensed. If a root LICENSE file or per-skill license file is added later, that file should be treated as authoritative.
AcademicForge
PaperSkills explicitly learns from AcademicForge for:
- skill registry design
- install command generation
- cross-agent platform support
- skill pack selection patterns
- attribution and license documentation style
PaperSkills is not intended to be a renamed copy of AcademicForge. The intended distinction is:
- AcademicForge focuses on installing and selecting academic skills.
- PaperSkills organizes skills around the paper lifecycle and concrete research scenarios.
In short: distribution patterns are borrowed from AcademicForge; the product workflow is research-scenario-first.
External Skill Packs
The PaperSkills web product may list or recommend external skills and packs from upstream projects, especially when a scenario needs capabilities beyond the core PaperSkills skills.
Examples in the current web metadata include AcademicForge-linked skills such as:
literature-reviewpdf-explorescientific-visualizationfigure-stylefigure-composerpaper-narrative- compute, model, and life-science workflow skills
These external skills retain their own upstream authorship, repository links, and licenses. PaperSkills should preserve source URLs, sparse-checkout paths, and license metadata in the registry whenever external skills are listed.
Inspiration
PaperSkills is also inspired by open academic AI-writing and research workflow projects, including:
These projects influenced the emphasis on practical academic workflows. They are credited as inspirations unless a specific file states that content was reused or adapted.
Public Scholarly Data Sources
Some PaperSkills workflows ask an agent to consult public scholarly sources for search, verification, or metadata lookup. Common sources include:
- Crossref
- Semantic Scholar
- OpenAlex
- PubMed
- arXiv
PaperSkills does not own papers, abstracts, metadata, PDFs, or records returned by these services. Users and agents should respect each service's terms of use, rate limits, and citation expectations.
User-Provided Materials
When you run PaperSkills on your manuscript, PDF, bibliography, notes, or dataset, those files remain user-provided inputs.
PaperSkills supplies workflow instructions, prompts, checklists, and report structures. It does not grant permission to reuse third-party copyrighted papers, private manuscripts, subscription-only content, or confidential research data beyond what the user is allowed to do.
Attribution Maintenance
When adding or listing a new external skill, update the relevant registry entry and this page if needed with:
- source project name and URL
- upstream author or maintainer
- upstream license
- install method and sparse path
- what was reused, adapted, mirrored, or only referenced
- required copyright notice, if any
Reporting Attribution Issues
If you maintain an upstream skill or project and believe PaperSkills is missing attribution or license context, please open an issue or pull request in the PaperSkills repository.