Sparrho raises $3M to democratize access to science research | Hacker News Reader

Sparrho raises $3M to democratize access to science research

venturebeat.com

Can someone describe the differences between this and something like ResearchGate [0]? The article here, which reads like a press release, does not provide much information beyond 'democratizing access' and 'curating content'. Oh, and throwing some punches at the big journals.

A cursory browse of their website seems to indicate they are just indexing abstract repositories and providing links to arXiv or the journal articles. Further, searching a topic like climate change science [1] yields only 89(!!) results, of which only 24 are displayed. And those appear to just be the most recently published--little value added.

From the headline, I was hoping this would be a paradigm-shifting new publishing company fostering a variety of open access journals. Instead, it seems to be a "machine learning applied" version of ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and many other similar platforms.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net [1]: https://www.sparrho.com/search/climate%20change%20science/

Well, researchgate likes to tell me I'm not elite enough to join their services despite having preprints and journal papers waiting for peer-review...

"Sorry, we were unable to approve your account request. We've sent you an email to ask you to provide some information about your research so we can reprocess your request. Please click on the link in the email to do so."

Oh yeah, and they never actually sent me an email.

There doesn't need to be any difference between this service and ResearchGate (or multiple other services in this space) for it to offer a better solution to academic paper discovery. There doesn't need to be any content under your desired search query either (although, you can sort by relevance after logging in). The article/press release states this is a free platform for people to collect and share "boards" on research topics, like Pinterest. Why not just evaluate it at that?

So I have briefly played around with this and it seems quite neatly engineered. Quick search.

I just have a hard time seeing how this will turn into a sustainable business.

One way of looking at this is that it is a high-end competitor to arxiv-sanity - at least in STEM. I understand that it integrates from many more sources but that actually is a problem.

A brief search for the niche I am in (a subfield of machine learning and comp sci) gives me thousands of results but hardly anything I would consider relevant in scope. It feels more like being inundated with anything remotely relevant, which is the exact opposite of what I want - it is already stressful enough to keep up with arxiv uploads.

I might not understand what the actual use case for this is and who would be the customer (as opposed to the user). Maybe it is more relevant to other fields (especially biology, medicine and so forth) as I have a hard time thinking of anyone in my research circle who would get value out of a subscription here. Then again, this is a highly biased view as STEM has made greater strides in open access than other fields. Nonetheless, I would not be surprised if researchers in other fields might feel inundated with new work just the same.

Hi everybody, I'm Vivian, co-founder and CEO of Sparrho. Thank you very much for your interest and feedback.

Our discovery engine focuses on making it easier for anybody to discover the most relevant papers to them as soon as they’re published - across all fields, regardless of the impact factor of its affiliated journal, or whether you're somehow connected to the authors by citation or social following (like in ResearchGate's news feed).

Some of you have commented we are not a publishing platform for open access journals and that's absolutely right. What we mean by curation on Sparrho is allowing experts to build pinboards that bring together peer-reviewed articles, patents, and their own expert summary to help others understand and explore niche fields of research, like PhD student Mark here: http://www.sparrho.com/pinboard/liquation-cracking-in-high-t...

Enabling open access to scientific research is nonetheless part of our long term mission. That will require collaboration, something that’s in our DNA as a company. Most recently we’ve worked with oaDOI to make 10 million free-to-access papers and author manuscripts discoverable through the Sparrho platform.

Following your comments, we've also tuned our quick search to a broader setting. @FTA, please try http://www.sparrho.com/search/climate%20change%20science/ again to see if the results are more like what you expected. We’re seeing >6.5k results for “climate change science” and >48k for “climate change”. :)

If you have any more questions, you can always reach me and my team at hello@sparrho.com or contact us on our Sparrho community Slack channel at http://heroes.sparrho.com

I sometimes get the feeling "democratize" is the new "disrupt"

Sci-Hub (http://sci-hub.cc/) has done more to "democratize access to science research" than this company ever could, and is much more deserving of this money.

Yeah, going to be an unpopular opinion here: Sci-Hub submissions were, in fact, illegal, even if it did do more to democratize access. As such, I don't feel like they should receive this money. A company trying to accomplish democratization legally should be getting this money. That, or change copyright law.

The proper title should be "pinterest for science". Basically it just collect publicly available abstracts, like a better RSS for daily skimming.

For the actual access to content, it does nothing.

Always interesting to see new ways to access useful material.

I wish they would have just donated $3M to sci-hub.

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