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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
