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Mek, this is great. Thanks for sharing & open-sourcing it. I love the idea of bringing together paper discussions online - whether post-publication peer revie

by jayunit 14y ago

Mek, this is great. Thanks for sharing & open-sourcing it. I love the idea of bringing together paper discussions online - whether post-publication peer review like f1000research.com or more casual discussion like r/science. One challenge I've found is that it's often difficult for discussion sites to gain sufficient traction to build a critical mass of discussion - http://plasmyd.com http://plasmyd.com, http://papercritic.com http://papercritic.com, http://scicombinator.com http://scicombinator.com, http://chemfeeds.com http://chemfeeds.com. I wonder if focusing on supporting existing small-group interactions (real-life journal clubs) would help? I took a slightly different approach when I wrote http://www.papernautapp.com http://www.papernautapp.com and chose instead to aggregate existing discussions about academic papers (mostly blogs, a few news sites, HN, and r/science, with a goal to cover to more sites and mailing lists). It's also freely licensed, and there are some interesting things I discovered that might be useful to OpenJournal (looking at your TODO list and GH issues): * CrossRef.org runs a ton of cool lookup/crossref/deref services at http://labs.crossref.org/ http://labs.crossref.org/ * They also have some great libraries at https://github.com/crossref/ https://github.com/crossref/ - who wouldn't geek out at this: http://labs.crossref.org/pdfextract/ http://labs.crossref.org/pdfextract/ * If you want to do some auto-identification on webpages, the https://github.com/zotero/translators https://github.com/zotero/translators project is great and actively maintained by the Zotero community. (Some notes on how Papernaut is put together, if you're interested: http://jayunit.net/2013/01/06/papernaut-exploring-online-discussion-of-academic-papers http://jayunit.net/2013/01/06/papernaut-exploring-online-dis... ) Lastly, if you're fostering discussion and feedback on papers, there's overlapping interest with the http://altmetrics.org http://altmetrics.org and http://altmetric.com http://altmetric.com folks.

ejstronge 14y ago
I think the issue of getting enough traction might be mitigated by restricting the papers that could be discussed. HN is a good example of this - very few posts engender discussions but those that seem promising (by the number of upvotes) are given a spotlight on the front page. I think an improvement to the services you linked to would be to add a few new articles each week from very selective journals/conferences in each field. I imagine existing measures like a journal's impact score or the number of a conference's attendees would be a good start and tracking blogposts (as you're already doing) could be a good supplement. This might help pull older or less visible publications out of obscurity; if something published in a domain-specific journal is germane to a discussion, a commenter might point this out while discussing a more highly visible article.
- mekarpeles 14y ago
  Thanks ejstronge and great idea. I'll see if I can get a group of hackers together to post one recommended paper a week. Do you have any interest in being informed? Also, do you know anyone who may be interested in helping curate / contribute?
  - ejstronge 14y ago
    Hey mekarpeles, thanks for responding. I'm a biologist by training and would be interested in joining if that's a field you'd be featuring - I think an environment where people could discuss recent, high-impact biology articles would be great.

by jayunit 14y ago

ejstronge 14y ago

I think the issue of getting enough traction might be mitigated by restricting the papers that could be discussed. HN is a good example of this - very few posts engender discussions but those that seem promising (by the number of upvotes) are given a spotlight on the front page. I think an improvement to the services you linked to would be to add a few new articles each week from very selective journals/conferences in each field. I imagine existing measures like a journal's impact score or the number of a conference's attendees would be a good start and tracking blogposts (as you're already doing) could be a good supplement. This might help pull older or less visible publications out of obscurity; if something published in a domain-specific journal is germane to a discussion, a commenter might point this out while discussing a more highly visible article.

mekarpeles 14y ago
Thanks ejstronge and great idea. I'll see if I can get a group of hackers together to post one recommended paper a week. Do you have any interest in being informed? Also, do you know anyone who may be interested in helping curate / contribute?
- ejstronge 14y ago
  Hey mekarpeles, thanks for responding. I'm a biologist by training and would be interested in joining if that's a field you'd be featuring - I think an environment where people could discuss recent, high-impact biology articles would be great.