I've reached out to the owner of scholar.ly, but he isn't interested in selling. This is an ongoing contention with us- do you think it'd be valuable, considering the time tradeoff, to survey grad students and test a few names?
While instinctive for many HN'ers, remembering to misspell and use .ly is an unnecessary burden for people like parents and non-tech friends. In my case, the average age of someone in my market is 50+ so I went with a .com.
A disclaimer is that I do invest some in domain names on the side. Unfortunately I hadn't bought this particular name years ago so had to pay $1500 for it.