Archive for October, 2008

Final Sync Preview Release: Zotero’s Notes Get Rich or Die Tryin’

We are excited to announce the release of Sync Preview 3, the final preview release of Zotero 1.5 before the initial public beta.

Along with a host of bug fixes, optimizations, and general improvements to Zotero’s syncing features, Sync Preview 3 includes new capabilities for rich-text editing of notes. Users can now take advantage of a wide range of rich text and HTML markup inside their notes. This feature comes through integrating the open-source WYSIWYG XHTML editor TinyMCE into Zotero.

Rich Text in Zotero Notes

Rich Text in Zotero Notes

Users can now italicize, highlight, change colors, and superscript or subscript their text, as well as use semantic features such as block quotes to better separate their own writing from quotes and ordered lists to create nested outlines. Users can also edit the raw HTML of notes for full control over the markup.

Official Statement

George Mason University has just released an official statement about the Thomson Reuters lawsuit. The press release is copied below.

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community.

As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote. As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: “The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating.”

CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged. CHNM will continue to develop and implement new research technologies in the pursuit of better ways to create and share scholarship. CHNM greatly appreciates the many supportive comments it has received from scholars, librarians, and administrators around the globe.

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