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!
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.
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.
care to elaborate more? I've always been interested in something like this to succeed. Its ridiculous that even today research papers have to go to an unknown set of referees who have no help from a wider bunch of more intelligent people to help them dissect whats good and bad about the paper. It is also great for outsiders/newcomers to quickly understand what the research community thinks about a particular paper.
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".
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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!
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".
http://peerlibrary.org 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!