I'm an engineer on the Semantic Scholar team that worked on integrating this feature into the site.
Here's a blog post that talks a bit more about what we're doing: https://blog.semanticscholar.org/announcing-a-new-way-to-rea...
I'm around to answer questions / discuss the approach. We're super excited and would love to hear your feedback!
Feature idea 2: better/shorter URL structure, the current URL https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/{title}-{authors}/{uui... ends up quite long and unreadable (may be good for SEO though). If you're rendering mostly arXiv papers you could setup a short URL scheme that mirrors the arXiv url paths: e.g if original URL is https://arxiv.org/abs/XXXX.YYYY your URL could be https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/arxiv/XXXX.YYYY
Good stuff!
1. Totally agree. We know how we can / will do this and plan to do so given enough interest in the MVP reading experience.
2. The url structure is indeed for SEO purposes. (We get a large majority of users discovering our paper pages through organic search)