Collaborative notes on papers in shared folders

Would be great if each user of a shared folder could add notes (and maybe also labels) to a paper! Would make collaborative working with a shared reference library much easier!

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I would very much like this feature!

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Shared notes would be a great feature to have!

Currently our support for notes is quite rudimentary. We have quite substantial plans to improve that. This will go along with the notes and highlighting features for PDFs. We have plans to support collaborative notes.

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Some news since Oct’ 2014 to have a collaborative notes and labels in Paperpile (NOT in PDF in Paperpile !) ?

Sorry, no news here. I just wrote in another thread please don’t use the post dates against us. We are trying hard to implement an ambitious roadmap. We would have easily be able to implement the sharing features, but your fellow Paperpile users ask for Word, iOS, Android etc.

Thanks for your patience.

Thanks for answer, I understand your choice to focus your development team on Android/iOS app/Word plugin, it was not clear when I have subscribed to your app. I will search another app with better collaborative features.
Best regards

That’s fair. As I pointed out several times in this forum we strongly suggest only to subscribe for the existing features as we can’t guarantee if/when new features/products become available.

Paperpile is used by tens of thousands of researchers successfully, also for collaboration. So I don’t think we are particularly weak in this area even though our big collaboration update will take more time.

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There is a relatively simple workaround for this using GoogleDrive:

  1. create a new folder in GDrive (anywhere, it can even be inside your paperpile folder)
  2. find the pdfs you want to share and annotate with others, right click them (windows) and choose Add a shortcut to Drive
  3. select the new shared folder from 1.
  4. in that new folder, select all, share (anyone, commenter)

Now you only need to give your collaborators a link to this folder and (if they have a google account) they can read & annotate your files and you will see and be able to further annotate them through PP.

If you already have the papers you want to collaborate on tagged or organized somehow in PP, you don’t even need to hunt for them in GDrive. Simply star them all and then you can go to the Starred folder on GDrive and create their shortcuts from there.

Btw, the Starred folder works in exactly the same way, it creates shortcuts in GDrive, so it seems this whole collaborative annotations in shared folders should be relatively easy to implement in PP. When you create a shared folder in PP, just create an actual shared folder in GDrive and put the pdfs there as shortcuts, right?

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What I did is that I shared the Paperpile Drive folder with editing priviliges to the same collaborators I shared the Paperpile shared folder with, and advised all of them to set the Paperline settings to open pdf with Google Drive using a third party app like Kami or Adobe Acrobat so we can all highlight and annotate the same PDF.

It would be great if we were all able to use the Paperline PDF viewer with live colaboration instead, since it has a very good note tracking system, but until that feature comes this is a pretty good alternative too.