Best Self Hosted Alternatives to ReadCube Papers

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. (i-librarian.net)

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). (i-librarian.net)

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. (linuxlinks.com)

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. (github.com)

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. (github.com)