
Show HN: A HN/Reddit-style site for scientific pre-prints and publications - danielecook
http://upvote.pub
======
danielecook
As the title suggests, the site is centered around discussions regarding
scientific pre-prints and publications. Current sites supported are:

* arXiv * bioRxiv * Pubmed * Pubmed Central * DOI

Threads are submitted using the publication ID, DOI, or URL of a pre-print or
publication. PDFs are fetched when available and used to generate a thumbnail.

Currently, the site only supports academic email addresses. I am trying to
figure out the best way to open the site to all without having to manage spam.
Let me know if you have any thoughts/ideas. If you are interested in accessing
the site and do not have an academic email address please PM me with an email
address to whitelist.

~~~
o2348diuu
I completely understand the issue of not wanting spam of various sorts broadly
defined, but I do think restricting it to academic addresses is a huge
mistake. As an established researcher on the verge of leaving an academic
institution, but who is still very much interested in research, I'm becoming
acutely aware of how cliquey academics is, and how problematic it is for the
field and society as a whole.

The assumption that anyone who might have anything important to say would be
at an academic institution is extremely dangerous (just as is the problem of
access to journals outside of academic institutions, etc.).

~~~
afandian
Seconded. I'm not an academic but I deal with academic publishing and I might
want to participate.

My suggestion: use ORCiD.org for authentication with OAuth. This is a
researcher profile. Most academics have one (or should!). They're free, the
service is open. I think it strikes the right balance between barrier-to-entry
for spam and accessibility.

~~~
icebraining
How does ORCiD.org itself deal with spam? Seems like they just use a captcha,
no?

~~~
killjoywashere
More about ORCiD for the skeptical:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCID)

~~~
afandian
If anyone has any questions I can ask someone from ORCiD to come over here and
answer them. They're very open!

------
Kamshak
Really like the site! Not an academic but i was wondering why the thumbnail?
They all look pretty much the same, why would I want to see a thumbnail of lot
of text?

~~~
danielecook
Thank you - There are a few of reasons.

(1) the thumbnails indicate that the PDF is available and can be downloaded.
This is to promote submissions from pre-print servers and open access journals
that make their research readily available. If the PDF is behind a paywall
there will not be a thumbnail.

(2) the behavior of the site differs slightly from HN and Reddit. Clicking the
title link of a publication takes you to be comment page, whereas the
thumbnail takes you to the PDF. Open to hearing what people think about this,
but the thumbnail image replaces the title link.

(3) the thumbnails do tend to look similar - but you can often tell what
journal it is in and you can recognize familiar papers from it. I like it when
authors put figures up front too which some of the ML paper do and which adds
some variety.

~~~
terrantech
I think the sort of people who are looking up scientific articles would almost
entirely be the same sort of people who appreciate information density and
hate useless whitespace.

Your first and second points could be satisfied by showing a small PDF icon
where the thumbnails currently are. Whatever size that allows the listings
themselves to be as close together as possible. The PDF icon could also be
different colours depending if it has a paywall, or an money symbol over it.

The really big thumbnails that mostly all look the same make the site look
very amateurish on first sight.

~~~
danielecook
Thanks for the feedback. The thumbnails could definitely be made smaller
and/or substituted. I'll be making some sort of change but not sure exactly
what yet.

~~~
euid
Compact mode, which Reddit also offers, is an easy way to satisfy both camps.
Set the default to whatever your users prefer (determine this with A/B
testing) and allow the other choice in Settings.

------
torgoguys
Cool, but personally when I hear something as being HN/reddit style, I think
of of the listings being pretty compact (submittable, votable listings are
done on many other places).

On my phone, I see about 14 listings per screen on HN, 9ish on Reddit (mobile
website, I don't use the app). This? Only 4. So whole I would personally
prefer something more dense, but good job nonetheless!

~~~
ravitation
I wonder, why not list them as just text titles? Do people really get value
from seeing a preview of the actual paper?

------
taylorexpander
I’m a researcher and I also think reddit and upvotes/karma is trash.

Why should I use your service?

~~~
zild3d
Do you think HN is trash or that upvotes are a bad system for this site? Seems
like the simplest way to have a community self-filter content

~~~
softawre
Reddit/HN are popularity contests. My guess is GP would prefer something more
like RottonTomatoes, curated by "experts".

~~~
azhenley
That is an interesting idea. I would worry that it would have the "cliquey"
problem that another commenter mentioned.

I do like the idea of having a public forum to comment on work, regardless of
where it is published.

~~~
fundamental
If you add comments, then you get to the problem of maintaining comment
quality which will likely lead to some form of moderation. IMO that leads back
to the "cliquey" issue just on another level.

------
rubidium
I do want to ask why you are building this? If just for fun, then it's a nice
project.

Building the site won't be the hard part, though I'm sure you'll get plenty of
feedback here.

Attracting a community of scientists that foster real discussion will be. Any
ideas there at what will set you apart and properly entice them?

~~~
danielecook
I built this for fun and I can say that it was fun to build! It's an
experiment too. But prior to building it, it was something I could see myself
using.

To entice users, I have thought about adding features that users find directly
useful to their work (e.g. the ability to take notes on papers within the site
and export them), or the ability to export saved articles as bibtex... but I'm
still thinking this through. Open to ideas.

~~~
Paul-ish
What if you allowed users to curate lists of articles (maybe with options for
RSS or notifications)? I think we would see lists like "Seminal papers in X
area". Maybe anything that helps people find stuff that is a) good b) what
they are interested in would get them engaged.

------
fuklief
Some idea for other subs: Computer Science/Maths/Physics should be the most
common I think

Also [https://eprint.iacr.org/](https://eprint.iacr.org/) is used a lot for
publishing crypto preprints

~~~
comnetxr
A sub or filter for each of the arxiv subcategories would make sense and would
be easy to implement for papers submitted from the arxiv. As someone in
physics, i would most likely want to contribute comments in my subfield and
just view top papers (or most discussed) from a combined physics super
category.

------
auggierose
I like the idea, I think eventually peer review should be done on a site like
this. It might be helpful to think about why currently, this site would not be
suitable for peer review, and work towards that it might be in the future.

Peer review as it currently works is not perfect, but it is the status quo, so
needs to be taken into account. Obviously many things can be considered to be
changed, for example I would enforce that anyone who comments is displayed
with his/her real name.

~~~
kiliantics
Why do you think the real name is important? I think that there are so many
people in academia whose position is precarious and subject to the whims of
people in powerful positions - many of whom have ego issues. It would be great
to have an anonymous forum that the community used to discuss the current
state of their field where people could be more open about their (potentially
controversial) opinions. This could work out better for science.

A statement about scientific research should stand on its own merit,
regardless of who it came from.

~~~
achileas
Who it comes from is part of that merit - there's a big difference between
some untrained person shouting "correlation isn't causation" when it was never
implied in the first place (ie every thread on reddit that references any sort
of scientific article) and someone who has a deep background in the specific
niche that the paper addresses.

Peer review is to be done by one's peers, not some random anonymous commenter.

------
jessriedel
See also SciRate, which is mildly popular in the quantum info community.

[http://www.scirate.com](http://www.scirate.com)

~~~
danielecook
Thank you - I have never seen this.

~~~
jessriedel
I highly recommend messaging the developers. I was interested in their project
(from an academic perspective, not a developer one) and got some good feedback
from them. In particular, SciRate has sort of stagnated and you'd probably
want to try something they haven't to increase the chance that you get a
foothold.

------
pwillia7
I have thought about a site like this before (as I'm sure many have)! One
thing I thought about is how do you keep noise out of the comments while
maintaining engagement with the community?

Let's say this takes off and is the answer to the publisher fees and everyone
posts their papers here an peer reviews them -- I assume that's the dream end
goal.

As the user base grows and engagement with posts grow, comment sections can
become overwhelmed by well meaning illinformed people or even bots with an
agenda.

Have you thought about registering people in the space and having a separate
section for them to discuss? In your mind, is the site primarily geared
towards researchers publishing and their peers, regular people looking for
more access to papers and the process, or a mix of both.

Very nice start and cool to see someone actually moving on this problem!

------
jorgemf
I hope the target audience is not researchers. I think it doesn't make sense
for researchers because they are usually very focused on a topic and don't
care (or don't have time) about papers on other topics.

I see this as a tool to increase the hype about Machine Learning. Only people
starting in the topic will use it.

It will make sense to filter the whole list with keywords or topics or
anything that filters the papers and shows only the ones related to your
researcher. The subs still have too many papers.

------
adventured
For non-mobile, increase the size of all of the text. You have a lot of room
to work with, there's no reason for text to be so tiny. That includes the
upvote arrow & text, and all of the article text. It's ok for titles to wrap.
Also add better spacing between each text segment that belongs to each article
(title, authors, date submitted, comments).

Mobile is obviously the extreme majority target now, however it should take
less than 20-30 minutes to do a good job adjusting the styling to make it a
much better experience on non-mobile.

Small issue: when I click an arrow, it properly gives me a basic alert() that
I need to be logged in to do that, but it still changes the arrow to blue. I
suspect it's an MVP, and you may already be aware of that.

------
xioxox
You might want to investigate having a mode where you can see some of the
figures from each paper. This works very well for astronomical arxiv papers:
[http://arxiver.moonhats.com/](http://arxiver.moonhats.com/)

------
tmalsburg2
I'm getting server error 502. But I'm looking forward to testing this. I can
certainly see this as being useful. In my research area some discussion is
taking place on twitter but it's too scattered and too superficial to be
useful.

~~~
danielecook
If there are any subs you would like to have added please let me know.
Currently, I know the site is restricted to biology and a small stats section
but I can easily add chemistry, physics, math, etc.

~~~
ivh
Yes, please, physics and astronomy. Maybe the same subdivisions as arXiv?

Promising site!

~~~
danielecook
Thanks - I'd love to add these but I was unsure whether they would be
appropriate. Going off of the biology section on arXiv - I think there are
better ways to subdivide a field. Are there any improvements/consolidation
that would be appropriate for those subdivisions on arXiv for physics and
astronomy?

------
sinab
This is awesome! One suggestion I should make: I think it would be nice to
have the abstract underneath the title of the paper so I can skim to see what
the doc is about before opening it.

Also I was wondering how you went about grabbing contents from the Bioarxiv?
Are you using their RSS feed? I built a web scraper myself which will grab the
pdfs and relevant info from
([https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/recent](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/recent))
and store it on my computer (to run some ML algorithms) and it was kinda a
pain to do..

~~~
Vinnl
I'd guess that it uses the API: [https://share.osf.io/](https://share.osf.io/)

------
fuklief
It seems really skewed towards biology publications, is it on purpose ?

~~~
danielecook
That’s my background (:

I’d love to add subs for other fields but I wasn’t sure which subfields would
be best.

~~~
rhythmvs
Great work! I’d love to see added a stub for graphics, image processing, and
computer vision!

------
Vinnl
So one question: who is your target audience? Is it the layman/citizen
researcher who might want to read academic publications? Or is it more meant
to apply peer review to preprints?

~~~
tmalsburg2
One thing that I strongly dislike is the name, upvote.pub. Science is not a
popularity contest where the candidate with the most upvotes wins. To me the
name suggests that this site is trying too hard to force science into the
categories of social media and that it may not be a place for serious
discussion. I write this not because I want to be negative but because I know
that many of my colleagues will immediately be put off by the name.
ResearchGate is also trying to conceptualize academic exchange in terms of the
categories of social media and most of my colleagues dislike it. The platform
certainly looks like it could be useful but, yes, it's sending mixed signals
about the audience and purpose.

Edit: Downvotes? Please explain how I violated the etiquette?

~~~
trentmb
> Science is not a popularity contest where the candidate with the most
> upvotes wins.

Correct, it's the most citations.

~~~
tmalsburg2
It's easy to be cynical about this, but even citation count is a more useful
signal than upvotes.

------
Rainymood
Really, really, really cool. Site looks slick. I would definitely use this if
there were more users (the old chicken and egg problem ...).

My suggestion is not to restrict it based on email but to have a very very
strong voting policy (i.e. HN). If you say something dumb on HN you get
downvoted into oblivion, and that is OK.

------
doomjunky
How did you implement the academic email filter? Where did you get the domain
list? I just have registered my account with a none .edu email address.

------
app4soft
What CMS used for upvote.pub? Is this CMS open-source?

~~~
danielecook
I forked this repo on github:
[https://github.com/codelucas/flask_reddit](https://github.com/codelucas/flask_reddit)

Updated it ot Python3 and added a number of new features.

~~~
app4soft
Nice. Could you tell wich fork is your on Github[0]?

[0]
[https://github.com/codelucas/flask_reddit/network/members](https://github.com/codelucas/flask_reddit/network/members)

------
pluma
Hug of death?

~~~
danielecook
...And we're back! Hopefully it should stay up now.

~~~
app4soft
> upvote.pub collects information based on what pages you browse and what
> items you download on this site.

Please, dissable this sh*t function[0]! No need collect such data in our non
safe web...

[0] [https://upvote.pub/h/privacy-policy](https://upvote.pub/h/privacy-policy)

