Show HN: PubUp, "Hacker News" for researchers & scientists | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: PubUp, "Hacker News" for researchers & scientists

pubup.org

40 pointswenxun21 comments

A better tagline than "Hacker News for researchers" might be "Crowdsourced Faculty 1000". Either way, I wish you luck, as getting a critical mass of engaged users in this area is a very difficult task.

So many people do read and review papers, but then those reviews are just kept in a private file somewhere (or just in their brains) and hardly anyone sees them. So much great insight into published science is lost to the public this way. Lately I've been trying to blog about papers I read and then share my blog posts with http://www.researchblogging.org/, but even that isn't a very common thing to do.

If your site could become a hub for this type of discussion, it would be wonderful. Do you support (or plan on supporting) a researchblogging-like trackback system, in addition to comments? That might help you gain publicity too, if popular science bloggers link to your website when they discuss a paper.

Thank you for your input, yes, it is hard to attract users in this field, reaching a critical mass is even harder, and feel free to share the papers your read with PubUp. We just launched 3 days ago, and welcome all kinds of ideas. Can you explain a bit "a researchblogging-like trackback system"? PubUp.org does have a trackback when users link to the URLs of other sources. I took a look at your site, seems a very nice blog!

I just mean that you should make it easy for bloggers to work with your website, to leverage the science blogging community. Research Blogging isn't my website, BTW, I just submit articles there sometimes. But it's something you should look at. All these independent blogs write about papers, submit their blog posts to Research Blogging (baasically like a trackback) and then they are indexed and publicized by Research Blogging. You could maybe do something similar... say, add upvote/downvote buttons people could use that would link to an article on your site, and then have a trackback on that article linking to the blog post.

Yes, that's a good point. I think in addition to sharing research articles and reviews, the PubUp system can also be used to post or link to scientific news, blog posts, or anything related to the community, that's why we have a "News" category in addition to the "Bio, Chem, CS, Math, Physics, etc" categories.

I hope it takes off! The front page seems pretty crowded though, have you guys thought about having it take more of a focus on the content instead of recent comments, login, etc. in the center?

Yes, we built the site using an open source CMS, did very little customization, will definitely have to re-design the whole front page and everything.

A bit "About us": PubUp is an open access online platform for researchers to discover & share journal articles that are worth reading, to discuss scientific ideas that are worth spreading, and to connect with people who share similar interests. We'd appreciate it if you provide any feedback, comments or suggestions.

Couldn't really see what's the point here. my experience in academia (anecdotal) suggests that Mendeley already has a pretty substantial lead

Hi mende, thanks for your comments, a few things I can think of right now:

1. we want to change the current peer review system, instead of letting 2 or 3 reviewers deciding your paper's fate, why not take advantage of ALL peers in your field? We're not quite there yet as it is a big goal, and we believe this is the right direction to head to.

2. academic journal publications are growing exponentially, how to select good papers from noise? PubUp provides peer curated selection of papers that are worth reading.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea a lot, and I firmly believe web technology should be introduced to academia. It is just I don't see how you differentiate yourself from other service. For instance, the frontpage of PubUp seems strikingly similar to the "papers" page at Mendeley.

I'm completely open to an alternative service (or even a complementary one). So... I guess what I'm trying to say: Give me, one of your intended customers, a compelling use scenario or value-add proposition that might compel me to switch.

I think you've gotten the wrong end of the stick with Mendeley. It's a reference manager with social features, some of which could be used (with work on the part of the user) for discovery / post-publication review.

PubUp, in contrast, looks like it is designed specifically for those two things.

Presumably to use PubUp I don't need to store my PDFs in Mendeley, to have signed up to their web component, to have found a group of people whose opinions I trust, yadda yadda.

On a tangent Mendeley also certainly hasn't sewn up the market: the majority of researchers still use one of a couple of older, more established desktop apps for their reference management. That's certainly not to say that it's not a good product, it is, or that they won't become an incumbent eventually, I reckon they probably will. It's just that scientists are a notoriously hard bunch of people to reach.

Sounds like an excellent idea, I think. I've often thought the HN model could be applied to different fields as long as you attract the right kind of user and gain the critical mass necessary. Good luck!

Not qualifying as a "Hacker News" for Research / Sci

1) Specific topics -- HN is a general " what matters to startup kids " ( yes hard science is thicker )

2) You're wanting a better way to publish papers? Are you trying to get additional funding for this research?

3) HN has become a default bc its a sorting method for VC to dole out cash. Is the NSF reading?

I think you're in the right mindset but tell me what you're trying to do here.

We are trying to build a system where users can share papers (both published and preprint) they deem important, write a short review/commentary on the paper: why it is good or not good, what else can be done, whether the experiment can be reproduced, is the conclusion solid or not, etc, then people can comment on the paper, comment on the reviews, upvote/downvote, any everything.

This is our fun side project, and we just launched 3 days ago, so badly need feedback from the community. Thanks for your comment!

A piece of design advice, until you get enough content collapse the different areas into one feed. That way you are more likely to get people to stay on board.

This is a valid point, we definitely need to improve that, right now we don't have much content, it looks like an empty shelf, lol

The website looks terrible on Dolphin (Android) (on the What's hot page, the up/down buttons take up the whole width of the page).

Nice project anyway, best of luck to you!

Thanks for the catch, we changed the up/down buttons, can you check it again and let us know. Thanks!

I love seeing new vertical social news sites. Are there open source social news servers that anyone can recommend? It seems like it's becoming a trend to pop these sites up.

social news, yes, but the larger part of the Pubup.org site is for research papers and scientific journal articles, I believe this is the first of its kind.

Good Idea and very useful for scientists. Btw, Is it based on Pligg CMS? what marketing techniques you planned to improve registrations?

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