Ask HN: An academic web app idea, anyone interested?

This will be hard to do well and while the CPM might be great for some categories, it's a niche product. It would be a great service though.

Read an article about Techlens on ACM here: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1297268&dl=GUIDE&#...

http://www.PubGet.com

It can index more than RSS feeds (you know, government websites ;-)) and uses Lucene/Solr for searching documents.

Our website: http://kaveikiavaldzia.lt/ Source code: http://github.com/emilis/PolicyFeed

I would gladly answer any questions.

@kaelswanson had this idea 4 years ago (and I'm sure many others)

BUILD IT

Instead of simply indexing links to other sites, I think it would make sense to provide the necessary tools for academics to _easily_ host papers via this service. This way you wouldn't need to rely on typically paywalled online academic journals, and you wouldn't have to wait for papers to trickle down from Nature, etc.

I've thought about doing something like this for the arXiv, even something as simple as setting up a http://www.pligg.com/ may be a start; I'm planning to do at least that much for my own lab in the next few months.

I've already got two other startups of my own so I couldn't commit to a larger version of this side project at this point, but ping me if you want to chat about ideas and I could possibly point you to others with more bandwidth. I have experience in iPhone app development, web dev, and machine learning--and of course in startup founding and academia (I've worked in 7 labs doing research, now am a PhD student in astrophysics).

I have some experience in the process of doing the filtering you are mentioning as I write a blog on compressed sensing (http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.com/), a field that spans a wide range of communities that are, often, not talking to each other nor have the same culture.

I don't think Mendeley or any RSS feed services help much as they both target the same dead tree people who are generally about two years behind on the good stuff. Arxiv is good but not all the communities use arxiv either and so it really is a mix of different tools that yield the most results.

I have a high interest in expanding and automating my current processes and would be very much willing to talk to somebody who would want to spend some time on this.

I also agree with one of the posters, how much do you think people would be willing to pay for this service ?

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions.

Go on guys!

I am checking the websites and products mentioned.

At least now we know for sure that everybody is having this problem AND there is no popular solution to this.

By the way, I am in Brain research.

http://www.yourxiv.com at least explains the problem and promises a solution but it only covers Physicists.

http://www.academia.edu/ seems to cover everyone (I am giving it a try right now) but they are overdoing the social part. (too much facebook!)

http://pubget.com/ is not addressing this problem (as far as I understand)

http://techlens.cs.umn.edu/ TechLens also addresses this problem but it seems not to cover every body (all research areas).

Many other things mentioned are not related or are addressing different problems.

Still reading your comments, Ali

I've been working towards launching a startup called Bibdex (http://www.bibdex.com) for a little while now. I want to help all research-oriented fields to sift through the large number of publications.

It's amazing how many articles and manuscripts are published every day, not to mention blog posts and social commentary. Unlike the average person's surfing habits online, professionals in these fields are required to be on top of the available research, but most of the available research is not very good. That seems like a problem worth solving, and a potentially profitable one if industrial and institutional researchers are willing to pay to save their time and publish higher quality research.

I'm curious. Have you seen http://www.mendeley.com yet? If you have, why doesn't that solve the problem for you?

-- Sunir, Founder & Developer, Bibdex

P.S. I'm interested in having other people join as co-founders.

However, the one stumbling block that I see is an easy and effective way to extract citations. An important filter for whether a paper is relevant to me would be whether it cites some seminal papers in my field. There are services out there which index citations (SPIRES in my field[1]) but there is always a bit of a delay before they are updated. Using them would ruin the real-time nature of the service.

The only way I see around that is to extract the citations from the papers in the journal feed as they come in. But now the service has gone from a weekend project to a large undertaking that would require a substantial infrastructure to work.

I'll see how this thread continues to evolve, but I'd like to have further discussions about making this a reality.

[1] http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/

I too have wanted a search-engine/feed-reader, no-holds-barred web-experiment that does exactly what you describe. I'm not an academic, but I have fairly deep & broad reading interests across mathematics, physics, economics, history, etc. Ok, make that broad interests in basically every subject that is truly interesting. I'm the guy who pretty much reads journal articles for fun because newspapers, magazines, blogs, and most books suck and just aren't smart enough.

But it's more work for me to find reading material I like and want to learn from than it is for me to read it.

I could certainly hack around on something like this, as I too have been wanting to scratch this itch for a many years. I've got the time, since I'm currently un(der)-employed(ahh, gotta love contracting) and bored, but my first two roadblocks would be:

1) instant non-starter: I no longer have any university library proxy account to use to login and scrape the journals, abstracts, authors, citations, etc. I personally could care less about copyrights on academic papers. I justify my position via jury nullification using a jury of one—me. And I don't give a second thought to doing whatever dirty work it takes for building a system of scraping scripts to pull all info about every paper from every journal out there.

2) If the beta site gets even the smallest amount of traffic, I will be crushed by EC2 server and bandwidth bills.

I realize a bajillion other folks probably want to build the exact same thing, and I realize it's stupid to build your own when someone else might already be well along the way and just needs some help.

Anyone need a Linux/Ruby/SQL/Sysadmin/Wear-All-Hats-Get-Shit-Done developer? I'm in LA and on #freenode. Just say the word!