
Sparrho raises $3M to democratize access to science research - happy-go-lucky
https://venturebeat.com/2017/07/10/sparrho-raises-3-million-to-democratize-access-to-scientific-research/
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FTA
Can someone describe the differences between this and something like
ResearchGate [0]? The article here, which reads like a press release, does not
provide much information beyond 'democratizing access' and 'curating content'.
Oh, and throwing some punches at the big journals.

A cursory browse of their website seems to indicate they are just indexing
abstract repositories and providing links to arXiv or the journal articles.
Further, searching a topic like climate change science [1] yields only _89_
(!!) results, of which only 24 are displayed. And those appear to just be the
most recently published--little value added.

From the headline, I was hoping this would be a paradigm-shifting new
publishing company fostering a variety of open access journals. Instead, it
seems to be a "machine learning applied" version of ResearchGate, Google
Scholar, and many other similar platforms.

[0]: [https://www.researchgate.net](https://www.researchgate.net) [1]:
[https://www.sparrho.com/search/climate%20change%20science/](https://www.sparrho.com/search/climate%20change%20science/)

~~~
icelancer
Well, researchgate likes to tell me I'm not elite enough to join their
services despite having preprints and journal papers waiting for peer-
review...

"Sorry, we were unable to approve your account request. We've sent you an
email to ask you to provide some information about your research so we can
reprocess your request. Please click on the link in the email to do so."

Oh yeah, and they never actually sent me an email.

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naturalgradient
So I have briefly played around with this and it seems quite neatly
engineered. Quick search.

I just have a hard time seeing how this will turn into a sustainable business.

One way of looking at this is that it is a high-end competitor to arxiv-sanity
- at least in STEM. I understand that it integrates from many more sources but
that actually is a problem.

A brief search for the niche I am in (a subfield of machine learning and comp
sci) gives me thousands of results but hardly anything I would consider
relevant in scope. It feels more like being inundated with anything remotely
relevant, which is the exact opposite of what I want - it is already stressful
enough to keep up with arxiv uploads.

I might not understand what the actual use case for this is and who would be
the customer (as opposed to the user). Maybe it is more relevant to other
fields (especially biology, medicine and so forth) as I have a hard time
thinking of anyone in my research circle who would get value out of a
subscription here. Then again, this is a highly biased view as STEM has made
greater strides in open access than other fields. Nonetheless, I would not be
surprised if researchers in other fields might feel inundated with new work
just the same.

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vivianchan_s
Hi everybody, I'm Vivian, co-founder and CEO of Sparrho. Thank you very much
for your interest and feedback.

Our discovery engine focuses on making it easier for anybody to discover the
most relevant papers to them as soon as they’re published - across all fields,
regardless of the impact factor of its affiliated journal, or whether you're
somehow connected to the authors by citation or social following (like in
ResearchGate's news feed).

Some of you have commented we are not a publishing platform for open access
journals and that's absolutely right. What we mean by curation on Sparrho is
allowing experts to build pinboards that bring together peer-reviewed
articles, patents, and their own expert summary to help others understand and
explore niche fields of research, like PhD student Mark here:
[http://www.sparrho.com/pinboard/liquation-cracking-in-
high-t...](http://www.sparrho.com/pinboard/liquation-cracking-in-high-
temperature-materials/162826/)

Enabling open access to scientific research is nonetheless part of our long
term mission. That will require collaboration, something that’s in our DNA as
a company. Most recently we’ve worked with oaDOI to make 10 million free-to-
access papers and author manuscripts discoverable through the Sparrho
platform.

Following your comments, we've also tuned our quick search to a broader
setting. @FTA, please try
[http://www.sparrho.com/search/climate%20change%20science/](http://www.sparrho.com/search/climate%20change%20science/)
again to see if the results are more like what you expected. We’re seeing
>6.5k results for “climate change science” and >48k for “climate change”. :)

If you have any more questions, you can always reach me and my team at
hello@sparrho.com or contact us on our Sparrho community Slack channel at
[http://heroes.sparrho.com](http://heroes.sparrho.com)

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nzjrs
I sometimes get the feeling "democratize" is the new "disrupt"

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dublinben
Sci-Hub ([http://sci-hub.cc/](http://sci-hub.cc/)) has done more to
"democratize access to science research" than this company ever could, and is
much more deserving of this money.

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epmaybe
Yeah, going to be an unpopular opinion here: Sci-Hub submissions were, in
fact, illegal, even if it did do more to democratize access. As such, I don't
feel like they should receive this money. A company trying to accomplish
democratization legally should be getting this money. That, or change
copyright law.

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dracodoc
The proper title should be "pinterest for science". Basically it just collect
publicly available abstracts, like a better RSS for daily skimming.

For the actual access to content, it does nothing.

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EternalData
Always interesting to see new ways to access useful material.

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antisthenes
I wish they would have just donated $3M to sci-hub.

