About Open Paper

Hi. I'm Saba.

Welcome to Open Paper, a platform designed to help researchers and academics easily access and share research papers. Our mission is to make research more accessible, helping researchers spend less time managing papers and more time on their research.

In 2023, Debanjum and I started building Khoj, a fully open-source alternative to ChatGPT. It allows anyone to self-host their own personal instance of a fully-functional AI assistant, even customizing agents, models, and data sources.

It's been a wild ride. We're locked in on the conviction that the next generation of consumer tools should be open-source, privacy-focused, and community-driven. Even more so when it comes to AI, given the potential for misuse and the importance of transparency.

The Problem

In early 2025, I was going down a rabbit hole on AI safety and alignment. I'd just completed the AI Safety Fundamentals Course by Blue Dot Impact.

I wanted to get through some of the foundational papers, and found myself wanting:

  1. A better way to store & organize my annotations 1.
  2. A central place where I could easily access and share papers.
  3. A way to use AI to help me better understand my doubts.

Related to #3, I was especially irritated by the propensity of hallucinations and the feeling I had that my data was going into the ether as I used other assistants to read papers.

I started complaining to others about this, and realized I wasn't alone. Many researchers and academics were struggling with similar issues.

The Solution

So we decided to build Open Paper, a platform that combines the best of AI and open-source principles to help researchers like myself manage their papers more effectively.

While the code is open source, we decided not to optimize heavily on the self-hosting experience this time around.

Instead, we are focusing on building a great user experience and a community around the product. While building Khoj, we realized that optimizing self-hosting experience made us deprioritize the experience for users who just wanted a great product.

We want Open Paper to be accessible to everyone.

Okay, so what are we building? You can check out the manifesto, but the best way to see is to try it yourself :).

What Orients Us

Better Paper Management Upload, organize, and annotate research papers effortlessly with an interface designed specifically for academic workflows.

Human-Centered AI We're building a copilot, not a replacement. Our AI emphasizes grounded citations and transparent reasoning to help you learn and understand papers better, not just summarize them.

Quality Over Feature Creep Rather than trying to do everything, we're laser-focused on building a small set of features that work exceptionally well.

Enhanced Collaboration (In Progress) We need better ways for humans to work with humans! Streamlined tools for sharing insights, annotations, and papers with research teams and collaborators.

We launched the first version of OP in June 2025, and we're beyond excited to see how it evolves.

Happy researching :)

Footnotes

  1. Fun Fact, the project actually used to be called "The Annotated Paper", but I was advised that nobody would remember such a long name. ↩