

Show HN: Coredemia – share and discuss research papers - alixander
http://www.coredemia.com

======
juretriglav
See also:

[http://peerlibrary.org](http://peerlibrary.org)
[http://www.pubpeer.com](http://www.pubpeer.com)

There have been many more "comment on scientific papers" sites that came
before these, including one I built myself in 2011. This is a really difficult
market to succeed in, in fact, no one up to this point has. I hope you do.
Good luck!

~~~
alixander
Ah I searched for similar sites before making this but missed these, thanks
for sharing them! Pubpeer describes itself as for researchers/scientists but
Peerlibrary seems to be pretty close.

A little difference in intent: The idea I had in mind wasn't for someone to
particularly do research/collaborate in a field, but just to discover
interesting/enlightening papers to read given the urge to learn, in-depth,
something new. I thought about attaching a "pre-requisites" fields or
"difficulty" field but I wasn't sure if that'd work. The inspiration was just
some people posting in my school's Computer Science group that they wanted to
start reading research papers, asking where to start. Hopefully in the near
future the "Most Favorite" will be a good list to begin with.

~~~
paletoy
Not wanting to discourage you, but reddit.com/r/science does something pretty
similar and very successfully - they have 6 million subscribers ,many comm
enters are scientists, and the comment quality is usually very high , and they
have the reddit mail support which is highly conductive to getting responses
from people.

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dkural
Some unsolicited advice: If anything, your consistent users have a lot of ways
to discuss papers: classrooms, sections, MOOCs, stack* questions, conferences,
proceedings, editorial pages of journals, invited lectures, ... In fact, a
large of what people who read & write papers do is share and discuss them.

Another problem is, since your "social object" cannot maintain enough
synchronous interaction, it becomes a dead social network. Not enough people
will read & discuss the same paper at the same time. If you are going to fix
one problem, this is it. # of papers or # registered users is not important,
The only important metric is #time spent between me leaving a comment on the
paper I'm currently reading & someone else liking, responding, etc. in a
relevant way. Otherwise people have no reason to go there, it's an empty room.

So suppose you restrict the papers. Then it starts looking a lot like a
scientific journal with social features - which a lot of sci journals are also
doing, without a lot of interaction going on (see comments sections of PLoS
journals).

As others commented - tough market. Try to elucidate a narrow user segment &
journey using a model like "Crossing the Chasm".

~~~
alixander
That's very useful advice, thank you. I wonder how I might further facilitate
the discussion part of it. List of "unanswered questions" (taking advantage of
the fact people like to help others in an intellectual setting, generally
speaking) and having a "paper of the day" come to mind, among some other
things. On that idea of narrowing user segment, I was initially of thinking
for it to be just targeted for the "hacker" community (computer science, math,
psychology articles seem pretty popular here), but I figure if that does
happen it'll just happen naturally without restrictions/limitations.

~~~
dkural
Both of your ideas really good - a 'paper of the day' or some other way of
narrowing content so achieve fusion. hacker community is also a great focus,
since there is a lot of first-adopters, willingness to use new things etc.

Even more unsolicited advice: I would NOT assume it will happen naturally - in
fact restriction is your best friend. Stackoverflow did not allow people to
simply create new communities, it restricted this quite a bit. Even GitHub
initially cultivated its roots in the Ruby community, which then spread to
adjacent communities.

Likewise many communities delineate borders and delete user content.
Stackoverflow likes concrete questions, for instance. Tumblr doesn't allow
comments. Limits are your friend.

"Papers for Hackers" has differentiation & a lot more likely to succeed. I
think it'd be awesome to cultivate this actively. Perhaps it comes with code
examples linked to github etc.

------
jcr
I love the idea. There are quite a few people who regularly submit research
papers to HN, usually as pdf files, but papers take more effort than articles,
so seldom is there much uptake or discussion. You might want to look at the
past pdf submissions on HN to help build up your library of papers. The
Algolia HN Serarch does really good with this:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=#!/all/forever/prefix/0/pdf](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=#!/all/forever/prefix/0/pdf)

At present, I know of no way to find all of the HN submissions of abstracts,
but searching for sites known for having abstracts (along with freely
available papers) like arxiv.org should help find some more.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=#!/all/forever/prefix/0/arxiv.org](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=#!/all/forever/prefix/0/arxiv.org)

Good Luck!

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davorak
Are there plans to license the posted content similar to stackoverflow so it
can be used for the public good?

Having a queryable database of comments on journal articles would certainly be
nice. The SO equivalent would be:
[http://data.stackexchange.com](http://data.stackexchange.com)

~~~
alixander
Sorry I have very little knowledge about licenses/copyrights, what does a
license on the content mean and how would it work?

~~~
davorak
The terms of service for coredemia is currently set so contributors retain
nearly all rights to the content they post.

If you look at the bottom of stackoverflow.com you can read that all
contributions to SO are licended under the
[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
sa/3.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) with attribution.

This allows for the information on SO to be remixed and reused by the public.

This license allows for all of SO to be downloaded and analyzed by whoever
takes the time an effort.

------
presty
for those who are not aware of it yet, there's a meetup group in NYC and SF
called "papers we love" that meets to discuss a pre-assigned paper - similar
to book clubs but a bit less rigid

NYC [http://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love/](http://www.meetup.com/papers-we-
love/)

SF [http://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-too/](http://www.meetup.com/papers-
we-love-too/)

~~~
pwelch
DC [http://www.meetup.com/Papers-We-Love-DC/](http://www.meetup.com/Papers-We-
Love-DC/)

------
MaxGabriel
Just wanted to let you know that the fonts being used aren't rendering well on
iPhone (I would guess this applies to mobile screens in general). In the
screenshot below, you can see the font on the <h1> has sort of a double-line
effect going on. The .paper_title font has this problem as well, though to a
lesser extent.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/ep6dknim0p6pm2e/coredemia.PNG](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ep6dknim0p6pm2e/coredemia.PNG)

~~~
alixander
Whoa I've never seen something like that happen. Hmm I guess it's probably the
font file, though I don't think Futura Oblique just breaks at larger sizes
lol. Weird... Thanks for pointing it out though!

~~~
bshimmin
This explains what's going on, I think:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5069752/ios-4-2-webfont-t...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5069752/ios-4-2-webfont-
ttf-s-bold-font-weight-rendering-bug)

------
jonlucc
This is pretty neat. The sign-up is very easy (thank you), but there is a bit
of a hole when I try to search for something that doesn't seem to exist (I
searched for "bone"). I would also like to be able to filter, not just search,
by overarching field (biology, chemistry, compsci, physics, etc). Looks good
so far, and definitely has the potential to be something I check regularly.

~~~
alixander
Oh yeah I probably should put a "no results found" when that's the case.
Sorry, there isn't many papers right now to search for. I think a "show only
_field_ papers" is a good idea, but there isn't enough to do that for now. I
think I'll go back and do this when there are enough to get some results in
each field. Thanks!

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maximumoverload
I got reminded of academia.edu.

I hate that site. Way more than I hate LinkedIn. And that's something.

Sorry for derailing.

~~~
YuriNiyazov
why?

~~~
maximumoverload
Well first it uses .edu domain name, indicating that it's something else than
it is.

Then it lures you in with a "download thesis" tease, with a big DOWNLOAD HERE
link. Then it forces you to fill in pages and pages and pages and _pages_ of
things that you have no interest in filling. Then it automatically "follows"
tons people that you have no interest in following. Then it starts sending
annoying e-mails.

Just because you wanted to download that _one file_ , you are suddenly in a
"network" you had no interest of entering in the first place.

As one Czech saying goes, "you give then a finger and they bite away your
whole hand".

------
cnbuff410
A RSS for new paper would be handy. Also, most academic people have Gmail
account, a Google account login support would be more convenient.

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milkers
I knew that some people would do that site if I do not. Thank you and good
luck!

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ghostzip
Fantastic implementation -- are you considering a Papers integration?

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eglover
RSS Please! I love the idea.

