| name | pilot-service-agents-academic |
| description | Scholarly literature and bibliographic databases — OpenAlex, Crossref, Europe PMC, PubMed, DOAJ, DBLP, Semantic Scholar.
Use this skill when: 1. Searching peer-reviewed works by author, title, keyword, or DOI 2. Walking the citation / funder / institution graph (OpenAlex) 3. Looking up a DBLP author page or a ROR organisation record
Do NOT use this skill when: - Full-text article download — agents return metadata only - Clinical guideline search (use pilot-service-agents-health — clinicaltrials, PubMed eSearch is in `academic`) - Book catalog search (use pilot-service-agents-books)
|
| tags | ["pilot-protocol","service-agents","academic","scholarly"] |
| license | AGPL-3.0 |
| compatibility | Requires pilot-protocol skill, pilotctl binary on PATH, a running daemon registered with the backbone (Network 0 — joined automatically at registration), and the `list-agents` directory agent reachable on the overlay.
|
| metadata | {"author":"vulture-labs","version":"1.0","openclaw":{"requires":{"bins":["pilotctl"]},"homepage":"https://pilotprotocol.network"}} |
| allowed-tools | ["Bash"] |
pilot-service-agents-academic
Scholarly literature and bibliographic databases — OpenAlex, Crossref, Europe PMC, PubMed, DOAJ, DBLP, Semantic Scholar.
All agents in this category follow the standard contract described in
pilot-service-agents. Send /help to any agent to read its exact filter
schema — the table below is a snapshot; the catalogue grows, so always verify
with a fresh list-agents query.
Agents in this category (snapshot)
| Hostname | Description |
|---|
crossref-funders | Crossref Funders |
crossref-works | Crossref works search |
dblp-author-search | Dblp Author Search |
dblp-publ-search | Dblp Publ Search |
doaj-articles | Open access article search |
europepmc-search | Europe PMC search |
ncbi-esearch | PubMed search (eutils) |
openalex-authors | OpenAlex author search |
openalex-concepts | Openalex Concepts |
openalex-funders | Openalex Funders |
openalex-institutions | Openalex Institutions |
openalex-publishers | Openalex Publishers |
openalex-venues | Openalex Venues |
openalex-works | OpenAlex works search |
ror-org-search | Ror Org Search |
wikidata-universities | Wikidata Universities |
What you can expect
- Deep OpenAlex coverage — works, authors, institutions, venues, concepts, funders, publishers
- Crossref (works + funders) and DOAJ (open-access articles)
- ROR for research organisation identifiers
What NOT to expect
- Full-text PDFs — rights-restricted upstream
- Private or institutional pre-prints (use arXiv directly for pre-print search — not yet in catalogue)
Commands (same pattern for every agent in the category)
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data "/help"
pilotctl --json inbox
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data '/data {json filters}'
pilotctl --json inbox
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data '/summary {json filters}'
pilotctl --json inbox
Response shape
send-message returns an ACK envelope immediately ({"ack":"ACK TEXT N bytes", "bytes":N, "target":"<address>", "type":"text"}). The actual agent response arrives a few seconds later and is read with pilotctl --json inbox. Each inbox entry carries the agent's normalised envelope in its data field:
{
"source": "<hostname>",
"items": [...],
"count": <int>,
"total": <int|null>,
"page": <int|null>,
"next": <cursor|null>,
"truncated": <bool>,
"upstream_url": "<resolved upstream URL>"
}
/help returns plain text. /summary returns a Gemini-generated prose string. Free-text queries also return Gemini prose.
Workflow Example
pilotctl --json send-message list-agents --data '/data {"category":"academic","limit":20}'
pilotctl --json inbox
pilotctl --json send-message openalex-works --data '/help'
pilotctl --json inbox
pilotctl --json send-message openalex-works --data '/data {"search":"carbon capture","per_page":3}'
pilotctl --json inbox
Dependencies
Requires the pilot-protocol core skill, the pilot-service-agents skill
(for the general discovery flow), pilotctl on PATH, and a running daemon
registered with the backbone (Network 0 — joined automatically at registration).