obsidian-paper-vault

obsidian-paper-vault is a skill for Claude Code from Aperivue/medsci-skills. It costs 113 tokens per session (1,885 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow that turns a folder of research papers in PDF format into an Obsidian knowledge vault. Obsidian is a note-taking app built around linked Markdown files.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to build literature notes, embed links to the source PDFs, and combine ideas from multiple papers into reusable concept notes.
Why use it?
It creates consistent paper summaries and connected concept notes without overwriting notes that already exist.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions subagents.

Part of the medsci-literature plugin — 6 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to build literature notes, embed links to the source PDFs, and combine ideas from multiple papers into reusable concept notes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/obsidian-paper-vault
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Aperivue/medsci-skills --skill obsidian-paper-vault
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Aperivue/medsci-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install medsci-literature, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for obsidian-paper-vault

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/obsidian-paper-vault/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/obsidian-paper-vault)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/obsidian-paper-vault"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/obsidian-paper-vault/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for obsidian-paper-vault

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/obsidian-paper-vault"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/obsidian-paper-vault.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 113 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,885 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • medium Rogue Agent · line 29
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00113 $0.01885
Opus 5 $0.00056 $0.00942
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00377
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00188

Measured 12d ago against content hash dbd654e5d3f7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

obsidian-paper-vault scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/extract_pdfs.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/obsidian-paper-vault/SKILL.md · 145 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 145 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Obsidian Paper Vault

Converts a folder of research PDFs into a two-layer Obsidian vault: literature notes (one per paper, templated) and atomic concept notes (synthesized across papers).

The rules below are not style preferences. Each one is here because its absence produced a specific, silent failure — a fabricated patient count, a broken PDF link, an empty Dataview table — in a vault of 100+ papers.

Relationship to /lit-sync

Both skills write literature and concept notes into the same vault folders. They enter from opposite ends and must not overwrite each other.

/lit-sync obsidian-paper-vault
Input Zotero collection / refs.bib a folder of PDFs
Note key citekey short descriptive title
Owns manuscript/_src/refs.bib extracted-text cache

Never overwrite an existing note. If a note for the paper already exists (by title, DOI, or citekey), report it and skip. When both skills are in play, /lit-sync notes are the bibliographic spine; this skill's notes are the read-through summaries.

Step 0: Resolve the vault layout — ask, do not assume

Establish three paths before writing anything:

  1. Vault root — from the user, or $OBSIDIAN_VAULT. Never guess a home-directory path.
  2. Literature notes folder — default Literature/. If the vault already has a folder serving this role (02_research/논문/, Papers/, 文献/), honor the existing layout rather than imposing the default.
  3. Concept notes folder — default Concepts/, same honor-what-exists rule.

For a vault whose structure is Korean, see references/locale/ko/note_templates.md — folder names and note headings in Korean, opt-in.

Also confirm PyMuPDF is available: python3 -c "import fitz; print(fitz.__version__)" (install with pip install PyMuPDF). Text extraction caches to ~/.local/cache/paper-vault-texts/ unless the user names another location.

Step 1: Pre-extract PDF text — always, for any batch

python3 scripts/extract_pdfs.py <pdf_folder> <text_cache_folder> [max_pages]

Read the full file on GitHub · 145 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 145 lines · 113 tokens per session scan A dbd654e5d3f7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

obsidian-paper-vault is a skill published in the GitHub repository Aperivue/medsci-skills (292 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 113 tokens to every session and 1,885 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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