
In Fermat’s Library, No Margin Is Too Narrow - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/in-fermats-library-no-margin-is-too-narrow
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shubhamjain
A website for annotating and discussing research papers. I am quite surprised
that this project hadn't existed already. It seems to be an obvious use of
collective mind of the Internet. Research papers can often be difficult to
understand and I had always wanted a way where it was something was clarified
in a simple language or platform where questions about it could be asked.

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amelius
But it seems the discussion is highly redacted and the papers that are up for
discussion are chosen by a panel.

So, as I understand it, it's not like you can ask questions about a random
paper you are currently reading, and ask the community for help.

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alister
> it's not like you can ask questions about a random paper you are currently
> reading

In the early days of the web, I remember a service that allowed you to comment
on any page on the web. I think it used frames. It embedded the page you were
looking at into a frame and allowed anyone to comment in the margins -- it
looked a lot like Fermat's Library. Unfortunately I can't remember what the
service or start-up was called.

I thought it was a great idea and very democratizing. You could comment on a
newspaper article even if they didn't allow commenting. You could comment on
Coca-Cola's page or anywhere on the web. What killed it wasn't spam,
advertising, trolling, or inane YouTube-style comments. Certainly those would
have been problems to deal with if the service got really popular.

What killed it was copyright. Some company sued them out of existence because
they were ostensibly violating copyright by embedding someone else's page.

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Groxx
Sidewiki was another approach, I don't _think_ copyright killed it. A bit of
googling shows something pretty similar though:
[https://epiverse.co/](https://epiverse.co/)

Close one door, and three plugin frameworks shall open, I guess.

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amelius
> Close one door, and three plugin frameworks shall open, I guess.

Yeah, but that means three standards, and thus dilution of the usefulness.

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strin
I wonder how crowdsourced paper reading can change peer review. For sure, we
need experts to tell the quality of a paper. But most interesting papers
coming out of Arxiv got read by experts anyway.

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ZeroCool2u
This is actually really cool, I just subscribed. I'd like it if we could
subscribe to subtopics or any papers that have been tagged with specific
topics. For instance, I'd like to subscribe to CS papers. I think we might
lose some of the crowd sourcing power if that was done too soon, but otherwise
it could be very interesting.

Also, the shirts in the store are cool.

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onhn
From their website: "Our goal is to make papers more open and accessible and
to foster discussions around their content."

Does anyone have an understanding of the copyright issues involved here? Do
they have (or have to have) permissions from arxiv and the journals to
reproduce these papers?

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raister
It would be nice to cross-reference with only open science links as well for
understanding key principles elsewhere. Nice initiative.

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imranq
I’m surprised they don’t have a mobile app yet. I’m also jealous since I
thought of this idea 5 years ago but did nothing with it!

Great service.

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coldcode
Seems to be overloaded atm.

