

Show HN: An open science community - kvh
http://science.io

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TheEzEzz
I really want to see some technology mojo pumped into academia. I've spent a
fare amount of time thinking about it, so here's an idea dump for you.

* A markup feature for people to highlight and comment on specific portions of a paper. This would allow students to flesh out missing details and allow researchers to ask more directed questions. The markup could also allow for links to more expanded discussion of concepts, such as on a wiki. People could also go back over time and add markups to the paper to direct people to new developments. The paper would essentially become self-documenting. This encourages more people to read, and may even encourage more interdisciplinary work, by allowing for paper documentation that would ease the burden for a researcher unfamiliar with the paper's jargon.

* How to solve the Chicken and egg problem? Target students, especially graduate students. They are young, more tech savvy, and are more idealistic about research (more willing to be open, less territorial). Give students a tool that will really help them (reading research papers is very hard, time consuming, and intimidating for students).

If a paper isn't available on your service, encourage students to contact the
authors to submit a print to the arxiv. Do this whenever someone searches for
a paper and it isn't found, and try and make it as easy as possible for the
student to contact the author (scrape the corresponding author's email from
the original journal?), as well as providing a template email (something that
says "Hi, I'm very interested in your paper, and would like to discuss it in
detail with other students. There is a great technology that allows for this,
but requires that your paper be on arxiv. Would you consider uploading a print
of your paper to arxiv? The open discussion should increase the range of
interest in your work.")

Encourage professors to encourage students to use the markup. A professor will
often assign a paper to a student to read, sometimes as a class project. If
the result of that work was a rich collaborative discussion that created a
resource for other students and researchers to more easily understand a paper
then I believe professors would be excited about the service. In fact, it
would make their lives easier because they would have a ready made bag of
potential projects for students.

* Integration with a collaborative wiki would be fantastic. I'd like to see a wiki for every subdomain of research. I should be able to go from a paper back to the correct point of discussion in a wiki, and vis a versa. The journal/paper system in academia is a mess, lacking any cohesion. Having a popular open journal will not in itself solve the issue of cohesion.

Populating the wiki could again piggy back on the work of graduate students.
Rather than a professor suggesting a student write up a 10 page paper on some
topic that will never be seen by anyone but the professor, instead the student
could flesh out a section of the collaborative wiki. This is great for the
student (the work isn't meaningless) and also great for the professor (there
will be many gaps in the wiki, providing for an easy grab bag of projects to
assign. Indeed, you could even make it easy for the professor by having a
section in every subdomain listing holes in the current wiki).

* I see work to reform academia in the same light that I see work to reform education (such as the Khan academy). Perhaps you can find allies there, as well as potential investors. Ultimately, if academia could be freed of the parasitic journal system the amount of money freed up could easily fund the development and maintenance of a very polished and sophisticated system.

All in all, I strongly believe that if a powerful collaborative tool were
available for students/researchers then the chicken and egg problem could be
overcome and real changes could be made in the academic community. I'm going
into my first academic job this fall (as a post-doc) and would love to have
some software I could point other academics and students to. If the software
were right I would proselytize it. My email is in my about if you want to chat
more.

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jpallen
Like any community site there is a serious chicken and egg problem. Even more
so in academia where there is a very engrained sense that research and
discussion should happen behind closed doors. I can't imagine academics
wanting to discuss their opinions too openly for fear of it coming back to
damage their reputation later. If you could foster an academic community which
was more open it would have a positive effect on the whole of academia, but
then we're talking about changing an institution not just building a
community.

I notice that you have made a point of being able to change the anonymity of a
comment at any time. I think this is one way to help with fear of damaging
reputation so good job with that.

I've got quite a few thoughts on the problem and ideas to go about tackling
these issues. I don't know if they'll ever come to anything, but I'd love to
bounce them around with people working in this area. My email address is in my
profile if you'd like to chat.

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lutorm
_in academia where there is a very engrained sense that research and
discussion should happen behind closed doors_

That has not been my experience. You must be in a different academy than I am.

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jpallen
Yes, different fields will have different styles. Perhaps my language was too
strong but I meant that people generally don't like to publish (make public)
their current research ideas until they have something well formed and
complete.

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saucerful
You do know about arxiv.org, right? This is the de facto place for preprints
in all of the fields that I know of, and is pretty much removing the need for
publications altogether. But it is definitely limited from a technology
perspective. Search is poor, subscription types are limited, no comments or
rankings (though many would argue that these last two are undesirable, at
least on the original site), etc. Would be nice if you could provide a front
end to the arXiv, but the amount of data on there is insane and you will need
some hardcore computing power to keep up. You could start with the cs papers
first, though.

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kvh
I like this idea a lot. For now there is <http://science.io/source/10/arxiv>,
or <http://science.io/source/3/arxiv-cs> for just CS.

~~~
lutorm
You really need to subdivide all the arxiv sub-disciplines. Noone's going to
look at the full arxiv output, there's just too much unrelated stuff for
whatever you're looking for.

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izak30
Is this your project? Have you seen colab[1]?

[1] <https://github.com/caseywstark/colab> [2] <http://colabscience.com/>

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kvh
Yes, this is my project. I haven't seen colab before, thanks for the pointer,
it looks very cool. I'll get in touch with Casey.

~~~
dsebrow
very interesting. Outside of computer science, it will be very difficult to
break through existing academic structures, but if you can find a (responsible
and efficient) way to do it, the possibilities are very promising. Take
medical research for example- all major medical studies are submitted to paper
journals (it may be a bit of an antiquated system) and reviewed by experts on
the editorial boards. Theoretically, you should be able to get your study
reviewed not just by a single expert, but by every expert on that subject
regardless of geographical location or journal affiliation. Just some food for
thought...

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kvh
>Theoretically, you should be able to get your study reviewed not just by a
single expert, but by every expert on that subject regardless of geographical
location or journal affiliation.

This is definitely a direction I would like science.io to go in in the future

~~~
dsebrow
I've worked on some medical publications, and you would need a very good
rating system. There are all sorts of low-quality manuscripts that uninformed
consumers might cling to if its quality (and the quality of reviewers) is not
made very clear. This is true about all publications, but especially medical
ones where many patients are beginning to look at the sources themselves.
Maybe you could even provide two versions of each article; a "professional
version" and a summarized "consumer version" for the regular non PhD folk...

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markkat
This is nice. I think crowd-sourced analysis is a massive resource that has
not been investigated nearly enough. I would love to browse feedback on PubMed
papers, as it could really save time.

Perhaps by incorporating a Methods Exchange of some sort, you might be able to
draw in the Life Science folk a bit more. Although we are cagey about our
pubs, we are pretty open to talk about methodology. That could be a project of
its own, but the angle might be worth considering.

Best of luck. Bookmarked.

~~~
shaohua
hey, nice idea. Can we talk more on this? Are you interested in working on
such a project?

~~~
markkat
Ha. My wife would kill me if I was working on yet another thing. :) But if
your looking for feedback, I'd be happy to share some. Email in my about.

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pauldisneyiv
I know nothing about the science/research community that would be helpful to
add - but I really like the direction you're going with the design.

Simple interface for content that is likely anything but.

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revorad
You could also hook into the Mendeley API. See
<http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/>

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karlmdavis
Just a minor suggestion: I'd add a tooltip for the Featured Papers'
topics/categories. The big two letter acronyms took me a second to decipher
before I noticed they're all CS-related. Would probably be a lot more
confusing once (/if?) you've added non-CS topics to the set, as well.

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chasingsparks
I actually started working on something like this a week or two ago called
falsifiable.org. My time is limited but I've thought about the project a lot.
You seem to be doing what I want anyway, so please drop me an email for an
exchange of ideas.

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checoivan
Kudos on this. Great to see a good place to find this type of data, specially
since other sources like Nature are very expensive.

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pixcavator
Will there be time when everybody keeps his stuff at his own site and all of
these "communities", aggregators, middlemen die out?

