Best Self-hosted Alternatives to Mendeley

I, Librarian is a web-based application for organizing, annotating and sharing collections of PDF papers and office documents. It targets individual researchers and small-to-medium research groups, providing centralized storage, in-browser PDF annotation and advanced full-text search including OCR support.

Key Features

• Centralized library management with multi-user access and project-based collaboration.
• In-browser PDF viewer with multicolor highlighting, pinned/shared notes and exportable annotations.
• Powerful full-text search across metadata, PDF text and annotations with multilingual OCR for scanned documents.
• Import and metadata harvesting from scientific sources (arXiv, PubMed, NASA, IEEE, Crossref, etc.) and citation export (BibTeX/EndNote/etc.).
• Multiple deployment options: hosted service, Docker deployment or manual install; optional integrations such as SSO (OpenID/SAML/LDAP).

Use Cases

• Research labs or departments that need a shared, searchable repository of papers and collaborative annotations.
• Individual academics or students who want a personal reference manager with in-browser annotation and full-text search.
• Institutions that need controlled access to a centrally hosted PDF library with audit and group features.

Limitations and Considerations

• Self-hosted installations require a PHP-capable web server and a database backend; official instructions reference Apache + PHP 8+, and optional external tools (LibreOffice, Tesseract OCR) for Office import and OCR functionality. Installation and OCR depend on those external components being present and configured.

I, Librarian is available as a hosted SaaS or as a GPL-3.0 free edition for self-hosting; the project repository and deployment artifacts (Dockerfile, Caddyfile) are publicly maintained. It is focused on research-oriented PDF management and team collaboration.