What it does
II-Commons Skills packages retrieval across arXiv, PubMed and PMC, and supported US policy corpora as an agent skill and a command-line tool. The repository describes the results as fast, daily-updated and deterministic, and names psql_bm25s, a PostgreSQL BM25S extension, as its lexical retrieval engine. The CLI has a cutoff command that reports the latest coverage date of each corpus, search commands for each corpus with filters such as start date, maximum results and policy jurisdiction, and meta and markdown commands that take an identifier such as an arXiv ID or a PMCID. Output is JSON on stdout and errors are JSON on stderr, which suits use by agents. To use it, ask your agent to add the skill from the repository, or run it with npx using the @intelligentinternet/ii-commons package. Node.js 18 or newer is required. Basic usage works without authentication, and an API token can be requested through the project's web app for higher usage limits. The project is licensed under Apache-2.0.
Capabilities
- Search across arXiv, PubMed/PMC and US policy corpora
- Cutoff command that reports the latest coverage date for each corpus
- Filters for start date, result count and policy jurisdiction
- JSON output and machine-readable errors for agents
- Installs as an agent skill, or runs through npx or a global npm install
When to use it
- Giving a research or coding agent a way to look up recent papers and policy documents
- Checking how current the corpus is before answering a time-sensitive question
- Scripting literature lookups from the command line
