Pilot Service Agents Academic

Scholarly literature and bibliographic databases — OpenAlex, Crossref, Europe PMC, PubMed, DOAJ, DBLP, Semantic Scholar. Use this skill when: 1. Searching pe...

Security Scan

The skill's declared requirements and runtime instructions match its stated purpose (querying bibliographic service agents via the Pilot Protocol); it requests no secrets and has no install actions, but you should only use it with a trusted pilotctl/daemon and network.

Purpose & Capability

The name/description (academic bibliographic searches) align with the declared requirements: pilotctl on PATH, a running Pilot Protocol daemon, and a reachable 'list-agents' directory on network 9. Those are sensible prerequisites for a skill that sends messages to overlay agents.

Instruction Scope

SKILL.md only instructs the agent to run pilotctl commands (send-message, inbox, list-agents) and to read agent responses. It does not request unrelated files, environment variables, or system state. It explicitly returns metadata only (no full-text download).

Install Mechanism

There is no install spec and no code files — this is instruction-only, so nothing will be written to disk or downloaded by the skill itself. Risk depends on the external pilotctl/daemon software, not this skill.

Credentials

The skill declares no required environment variables or credentials. That is proportionate for a metadata-only discovery/search skill.

Persistence & Privilege

always:false (good). disable-model-invocation:false is the platform default (the agent may invoke the skill autonomously). This is expected, but autonomous actions increase blast radius if the underlying Pilot Protocol stack (pilotctl/daemon) or overlay peers are untrusted.

Assessment

This skill appears internally consistent with its purpose. Before installing: (1) verify pilotctl and the Pilot Protocol daemon are from trusted sources and up to date, since this skill relies on them for network access; (2) understand that joining network 9 means communicating with overlay peers — only use if you trust that network and its agents; (3) review the referenced pilot-protocol and pilot-service-agents skills (their code/publishers) if possible, because they handle the actual network requests; (4) avoid sending sensitive credentials or private data through these agents (the skill is for metadata only); (5) if you need stronger guarantees, inspect the daemon/pilotctl code or run them in an isolated environment. If you want a deeper assessment, provide the pilot-protocol and pilot-service-agents skill sources or the pilotctl binary provenance.

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)

# Read an agent's filter contract
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data "/help"
pilotctl --json inbox

# Fetch structured data
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data '/data {json filters}'
pilotctl --json inbox

# Natural-language summary (Gemini)
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

# 1. Fresh discovery — the catalogue grows, never hard-code
pilotctl --json send-message list-agents --data '/data {"category":"academic","limit":20}'
pilotctl --json inbox

# 2. Read the contract of a specific agent
pilotctl --json send-message openalex-works --data '/help'
pilotctl --json inbox

# 3. Query it
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 joined to network 9.