Comment by robrenaud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robrenaud | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Why use this instead of a subreddit?

I'd love a great solution to this problem and I'd even consider trying to build one, but I am not sure there is any money in it.

One thing I'd love in an academic paper reader is something that allowed comments/annotations inline with the paper. For example, if a paper in the future contradicts something that is stated, you could add a comment linking to the contradiction. Or you could merely ask and provide clarifications, or comment on simpler alternatives to given part of the paper.

Also, I'd like to be able to rate papers for say, readability or difficulty, tag them as theoretical or empirical, etc.

I'd also like if cited papers were automatically dereferenced so I didn't have to hunt down the references myself.

Personalization would also be a nice feature. EG, recommend other papers by the same author, or other highly cited papers that cite/are cited a given paper, or frequent co-authors of some author that I like.

I'd love to be able to download a bunch of papers easily for offline viewing.

We launched http://scholr.ly in January- we've still got plenty of issues, but we handle some of your use cases, like citation linking. We also first-class authors so you can see an easy summary of a researcher's work. We're still working on personalization and have kicked around tagging/rating for some time- I'd love your feedback.

It seems like the rest of your issues could be solved by Mendeley- WDYT?

mhluongo -- Love that you specialize in search and have author profiles.

You guys should get in touch with the peer library guys, send me an email if you'd like an intro. I'd love to see more collaboration in the space.

Internet Archive (archive.org) is also interested in contributing to the space and has been super helpful in aiding our efforts at open journal.

I think the three biggest problems in the space are (1) discovery + accessibility (including open-access), (2) collaboration (sharing, commenting, contributing), and (3) quality assurance (maintainability, scm-backed, repeatable research).

There are many solutions to target discovery and accessibility but I'm (as an academic) personally dissatisfied with the level sharing/collaboration/openness, the lack of community, and the lack of standards in academic research. I think the world needs for academia and research what github did for social programming.

mekarpeles - an intro to the PeerLibrary team would be awesome- I'll do that.

I've loved the GitHub for science analogy ever since it first surfaced a couple years ago- I couldn't agree more.

rob, not really interested in the monetary aspects of this problem, more interested in the open-access nature.

There is a subreddit for academic papers, I figured it would make sense having something ultra-targeted for computer science papers and I didn't feel like the right community was using the subreddit (the results quality wasn't great). It did teach me that a lot of people like requesting papers, so this is something I am considering.

Also, this was a good opportunity for me to attack a problem I am really passionate about while testing out a web framework I've been writing (waltz).

Finally, I did the project for sentimental reasons. I was talking to Aaron Swartz about open journal a while back over skype and was looking forward to working with him on it, so I thought it would be nice to finish it in his honor :o)

You have some great ideas (mass download is something I've seen requested by some of my friends from my phd program). There's a team called peer library who's attacking many of these problems and I'll be giving them as much support as I can.

Thanks for your kind remarks + great feedback

Reply on news.ycombinator.com