Research notebook
Monitoring campaign · rainy seasonMare aux Hippopotames, Burkina Faso
I'm an ecologist. Three campaigns a year on a wetland, a waterlogged Rhodia notebook and, once home, six months before anything becomes a document a colleague can cite. I don't want to publish my science on a blog. I want my field observations to live where I took them, in a form a journal, Zotero or a student in 2036 can read.
Scenario. The screens are nTilia's; the campaign, counts and co-authors are invented for the example. No real DOI was minted for this story.
Week 0 · at the lab
In Settings I pick the Research profile. My missions are now called projects; the Academic style is suggested and I keep it. I create “Hippo monitoring 2026” and attach my protocols in Markdown. Nothing is public yet: it's my notebook, on my phone, synced privately whenever there's a network.
The protocol lives next to the counts, not in another app.
Day 4 · 5:50 a.m. · north bank
No network on the pond, as expected. I log the counts, two photos, a voice clip for the juvenile numbers I have no time to type. Every take keeps its position — but sensitive-field mode masks it by default on anything public: the exact location of a protected species never leaves the notebook. The counts table, meanwhile, will number itself in the article.
The exact spot stays in my takes. The public sees the area, not the coordinate.
Week 3 · back home
I turn the campaign summary into a publishable note. In the inspector I write the abstract — five sentences: question, site, method, take-away. I add Awa and Mariam as co-authors: name, ORCID, affiliation, role in the field. Footnotes and the density formulas go in as-is. The abstract heads the article and flows into JATS, RIS and the ScholarlyArticle JSON-LD without me touching anything.
Three names on the byline, three ORCIDs in the metadata. Like a journal.
Week 3 · Friday
The article is published under CC BY 4.0. From the editor menu: Deposit on Zenodo. nTilia renders the preprint PDF — title, authors, affiliations, abstract, licence — and sends it with the Markdown source to CERN's archive. Thirty seconds later the DOI is there: in the frontmatter, under Cite, in BibTeX and RIS. It won't move, even if I fix a typo tomorrow.
The DOI names the work. Corrections stay on the page.
Later
A PhD student in Ouagadougou found the note through Google Scholar — the Highwire tags and the ScholarlyArticle did the work. He dropped it into Zotero in one click, RIS with all three authors. The PDF he cites is Zenodo's, not a screenshot. And if nTilia ever disappears, the DOI still resolves to that copy, and my notebook is still a folder of Markdown files I can export as a ZIP whenever I want.
The notebook is mine. The citation belongs to everyone.
Why nTilia
nTilia replaces neither the journal nor the institutional repository. It's the field notebook that, once reviewed, becomes citable: offline, GPS masked, declared abstract and co-authors, Zenodo DOI, Zotero in one click, ORCID everywhere.
Durability
Your notes are open Markdown files with readable frontmatter. A project exports as a ZIP at any time, takes and protocols included. The PDF and Markdown deposited on Zenodo belong to CERN's archive, not to nTilia: the DOI keeps resolving if this site shuts down. It's the only honest promise a tool can make.
Questions
Yes. It is minted by Zenodo, CERN’s open archive, with the 10.5281 prefix. The preprint PDF and Markdown source are kept there independently of nTilia; the DOI keeps resolving if this site closes. One deposit per article in v1; the DOI is frozen with the matching public version.
Zotero: while writing, import a local Better CSL JSON / BibTeX file and type [@citekey]; at publish, RIS and JATS buttons on every article, with all co-authors, the abstract and the DOI. Google Scholar: Highwire tags (citation_title, citation_author, citation_doi, citation_pdf_url) and ScholarlyArticle JSON-LD. Search-engine indexing is on from Pro; a Free journal stays unindexed.
In the editor inspector, Research group: name, ORCID, affiliation and role for each co-author; your own account ORCID is set in Settings → Journal. Everything lives in the article’s Markdown frontmatter, readable without nTilia, and flows into the byline, JATS, RIS, BibTeX, JSON-LD and Zenodo creators.
Yes, on every plan: GFM footnotes [^1] and KaTeX math inline ($…$) or block ($$…$$), rendered server-side in the article, preview, RSS feed and PDF, with no third-party script.
Your notes are Markdown files with frontmatter; a project exports as a ZIP at any time, takes and protocols included. Zenodo deposits belong to CERN’s archive, not to nTilia. Nothing that matters is locked inside the tool.
Free to write, take notes offline, declare abstract and co-authors. Pro for the Zenodo deposit and the DOI.
No credit card. Your files stay files.