About Nodus Research

What Nodus Research is

Nodus Research is the name of a software project. Despite the word “research”, it is not a company, university department or academic research group. What the name covers is a public code repository, this website, and the documentation and release archive that accompany them.

The project began as a personal initiative and has remained one. It is developed in the open: the source code, the history of every change, the issue reports and the tagged releases are public, and anyone may read them, build the application or propose a change. It has no investors, no advertising and no paid edition, and it currently sells no product or service.

Two names appear throughout the project and they do different jobs. Nodus Research is the project: this website, the documentation, the source code, the archived releases and the citation records. Nodus is the application a person downloads and runs, on macOS, Windows or Linux. Wherever the two could be confused, this site uses the project name for the project and the application name for the software, and the citation page gives the exact wording for citing either of them.

What the project develops

The centre of the project is the Nodus desktop application, a workspace that organises work into vaults. Each vault is an environment built for one kind of material: academic research, teaching, study, structured databases, genealogy or worldbuilding, with further modes for primary sources, oral testimony and prosopography. Every vault draws on the same Library of sources and the same search index, so a text imported once can be used in all of them.

Around the application, the project maintains the parts that connect it to an ordinary working routine: a read-only connection to Zotero, a standalone Zotero plugin, a browser connector for capturing material while reading online, and writing integrations that keep the route from a sentence back to its source visible.

The Nodus Toolkit extends the same environment with document conversion, translation, optical character recognition, file protection and PDF-based presentation, alongside Nodus Apps, a way of building small, adaptable tools that run inside the desktop application.

The project also publishes its own record: a wiki that serves as the manual, live browser demos that show the interface without installing anything, the release archive with every tagged version, the licence and the source history, and machine-readable citation metadata.

How the application is designed

Four decisions shape the software described above, and they explain most of what a new person notices.

Work stays on the computer. Vaults, the shared Library, attachments and search indexes are stored on the machine of the person using the application. Nodus requires no account, no subscription and no project-run storage service, and the project operates no server that holds anyone's research.

Interpretations stay attached to their evidence. A claim, a finding, a construct, a method or a framework is stored together with the work it came from and with the passage that supports it, including the page number or the timestamp when the source provides one. That link is what allows a generated answer or a drafted paragraph to be checked against the text it rests on instead of being taken on trust.

Artificial intelligence is optional. The workspace, the Library, the graph and the search tools work without it. Model-assisted features begin only after the person has configured a provider or a local runtime such as Ollama or LM Studio, and a task that does not need a model never asks for one.

The corpus belongs to the person who built it. Nodus ships no telemetry and reports nothing back to the project. Material leaves the computer only when someone chooses to export it, synchronise it, or send it to a model provider they have selected themselves.

Licence, funding and what “free” means here

Nodus is free software, published under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 only (AGPL-3.0-only). The licence allows anyone to use, study, modify and redistribute the application, including for commercial purposes, as long as its terms are respected. AGPL-3.0-only governs reuse and redistribution by others; that is a separate matter from the status of the project itself, which currently sells no product or service.

The project therefore has no revenue of its own and is not sustained by advertising, sponsorship or a paid edition. Its development is carried by the people who contribute code, documentation, translations, testing and precise reports of what needs to improve. The open-source page sets out the licence in more detail and explains the obligations it places on anyone who distributes a modified version.

Who develops it, and how the work is recorded

Nodus was created by Jorge Pérez Burgueño, who continues to develop it. He is identified publicly by an ORCID record, 0000-0002-1150-1930, and the contributions of other people are recorded in the same way as his own, with their author and date.

The project keeps its own provenance rather than asking anyone to take it on trust. The public repository holds the full history of the source, every tagged release and every public issue. Each release is archived, and the project is identified in the scholarly record by a conceptual DOI, 10.5281/zenodo.21515531, which represents Nodus Research across all of its versions rather than pointing at a single one. The citation page explains how to reference the project and the application, including the metadata formats that reference managers expect.

Anyone who finds a fault, a missing case or an unclear instruction is invited to report it. The contribution page describes how to send code, documentation, translations or a precise error report, and what the project asks for in return.

Name, identity and independence

The Latin word nodus, meaning a knot or a node, appears in many unrelated contexts, and other projects, groups and companies use it or similar names. Nothing should be inferred from a shared word. Nodus Research at nodusresearch.com is an independent personal project: it is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any university, research group, company or other software project, and it speaks only for itself.

Four identifiers describe this project unambiguously: the domain nodusresearch.com, the repository jorgepb96/nodus, the conceptual DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21515531, and the description “the open-source project behind Nodus”. When a name alone is ambiguous, those are the facts that identify the right project. Third-party names and licences that require acknowledgement are listed on the legal notice page.

Questions that come up most often

People who are new to the project tend to ask the same few things, and the answers follow from what is described above.

Is Nodus Research a research group? No. It is a software project: it develops and documents an application, and it neither carries out research nor represents any institution.

What exactly is Nodus? A free desktop workspace for research, teaching, study and structured data, available for macOS, Windows and Linux, organised into vaults that keep sources, notes and interpretations on the computer of the person using it.

Who makes it? Jorge Pérez Burgueño created the project and develops it in the open, with contributions from other people recorded in the public repository.

Does it cost anything? No. There is no licence fee, account, subscription or paid edition, and the project currently sells no product or service. The licence, AGPL-3.0-only, governs what others may do with the code and how a modified version has to be distributed.

Does it send my work anywhere? Not by itself. Vaults and indexes stay on the machine where the application runs, and nothing is transmitted unless the person explicitly exports it, synchronises it, or sends it to a provider they have chosen.