researcher-profiles

researcher-profiles is a specification for describing a researcher as a self-contained folder of structured files, plus the tools that read and serve it: a Python SDK, an rp command-line tool, and a web API for sharing profiles between tools.

A Researcher Profile (RP) captures a person's papers, expertise, funding, and career history in far more depth than a publication list. Privacy is built into the format. Every part of a profile carries a tier (public, internal, or restricted) set by the author, and the sharing API enforces it, so a public profile never exposes its internal or restricted parts.

The case driving it is AI. An agent can read a profile and understand what a researcher knows and has done at a depth that is otherwise slow and expensive to reach. It could pick paper reviewers on real evidence instead of a web search. The format is general, though: a researcher can publish their own profile and put far more in it than ORCID or Google Scholar will hold.

The rp command-line tool validates a profile against the spec, builds and searches embeddings over its contents, renders a profile as a static site, and installs or publishes profiles through a registry.

See the format specification.

This monorepo contains:

• spec/: the specification prose (in docs/rp-spec/) and a set of example profiles, valid and invalid, that define what conforms.
• rp-sdk/: the Python SDK and the rp CLI.
• scholarcore/: a shared academic vocabulary (Person, Paper, funding), published as its own package.
• rp-browser/: a browser app for viewing published profiles.
• rp-ui-lib/: React components for profile views.

Install

The two Python packages are not on PyPI yet. Install them from a checkout, scholarcore first, because rp-sdk depends on it.

git clone https://github.com/databio/researcher-profiles.git
cd researcher-profiles
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ./scholarcore
pip install -e ./rp-sdk

Optional extras attach to the second command, for example pip install -e "./rp-sdk[vectors,st]".

See the SDK documentation for the API, the CLI, and the optional extras. scholarcore has its own docs in scholarcore/docs/.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.