Open Scholar Skills vs ai.imboard/dossier
Open Scholar Skills is a plugin bundle for AI coding tools published by ZhangYGroup (Yongjun Zhang). Marketplaces we read that list it: 1 (Community GitHub marketplaces). ai.imboard/dossier is an MCP server published by imboard.ai. Marketplaces we read that list it: 2 (Official MCP Registry, npm registry (MCP servers)). As of our marketplace pass on 2026-10-28. This pair was picked by a reader, not by our comparison rule, so search engines are asked not to index the page.
Where each is published
| Marketplace |  ai.imboard/dossier | |
|---|---|---|
| Community marketplace joshzyj/open-scholar-skill | Listed Version: 5.22.2 Forks (GitHub): 25 Stars (GitHub): 178 Not marked · First seen |
Not listed |
| Official MCP Registry | Not listed | Listed Version: 1.0.4 Downloads/month (npm): 20 197 Downloads/week (npm): 4 125 Forks (GitHub): 3 Stars (GitHub): 10 Not marked · First seen |
| npm registry (MCP servers) | Not listed | Listed Version: 1.6.5 Downloads/month (npm): 20 197 Downloads/week (npm): 4 125 Forks (GitHub): 3 Stars (GitHub): 10 Not marked · First seen |
Each figure is the marketplace's own and is never added up across marketplaces. A marketplace that publishes no figure shows none: no number is not zero.
The facts side by side
| Fact | Open Scholar Skills | ai.imboard/dossier |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplaces that list it (differs) | 1 (worse) | 2 (better) |
| Stars (GitHub) (differs) | 178 (better) | 10 (worse) |
| Forks (GitHub) (differs) | 25 (better) | 3 (worse) |
| Last release | Not published | Not published |
| Where it runs (differs) | Installs as a plugin bundle | On your machine (@ai-dossier/mcp-server) |
| Transport (differs) | Not stated | stdio |
| Tools it declares | Not published | Not published |
| Environment variables it asks for | Not published | Not published |
| Licence (differs) | Not stated | AGPL-3.0-only |
| Repository (differs) | github.com/joshzyj/open-scholar-skill | github.com/imboard-ai/ai-dossier |
| Changes in the last 7 days | 2 | 2 |
| First seen (differs) | 2026-10-24 | 2026-10-11 |
Lines where the two differ have a tinted background and bold values. Where the data itself says which value is better (more marketplaces, a larger figure of the same marketplace, a fresher release, a verified mark on a marketplace that lists both), the better one is also marked green with ▲ and the worse one red with ▼. Where it runs, the transport, the tools, the settings, hooks, the bundle's parts, the licence and the week's changes are marked only as different: more or fewer is not better in itself.
What each says it does
Open Scholar Skills
The full social-science research pipeline as skills: idea formalization, systematic literature review, theory and hypotheses, research design with power analysis, causal identification, EDA, analysis with publication-quality tables and figures, computational social science, LLM annotation, section-by-section drafting, citation verification, journal formatting, ethics, replication packages, and simulated peer review. Ships specialized reviewer, code-review, and verification subagents, plus a PreToolUse data-safety guard.
ai.imboard/dossier
MCP server for dossier automation standard - enables LLMs to discover, verify, and execute dossiers
How to run each
Open Scholar Skills As a Claude Code plugin
/plugin marketplace add joshzyj/open-scholar-skill
/plugin install open-scholar-skill@open-scholarai.imboard/dossier As a local MCP server: npm package
claude mcp add --transport stdio dossier -- npx -y @ai-dossier/mcp-serverCommands built only from what the marketplaces declare; the full set for every client is on each card.
Tools each declares
Neither one's marketplaces publish a list of tools, so there is nothing to compare.
Settings each asks for
Neither one's marketplaces publish the settings it asks for.
What it can do: Open Scholar Skills · What it can do: ai.imboard/dossier · Compare two other plugins
Data comes from public marketplace files in GitHub repositories of their authors. Data comes from the Official MCP Registry (registry.modelcontextprotocol.io), CC0 1.0. Package data comes from the public npm registry (registry.npmjs.org). Figures come from our own regular passes over the marketplaces, last read on . We publish no contact details for plugin publishers.