Paperkast: Academic article sharing and discussion
This blog post has been written for introducing Paperkast.com, give information about the website and receive feedback from users.
Introduction
Recently, online academic debates have begun to appear in many parts of the internet, especially on Twitter. Twitter is a great medium for PR for your article and also to be aware of other people’s work. A large number of academics, graduate students, and scholarly article readers, use it as an RSS feed. What’s more, scientists also receive feedback on their articles. But the problem of this niche is that the discussion on a certain article is not collected in one place.
In fact, online article discussion is not a new concept. Previously, sites such as PubPeer, Fermat’s Library are founded for debate and anotation on the papers. PubPeer debates are quite famous (it also creates sensation). The aim of Fermat’s Library is a little more on the annotation side of the paper. The only problem of these websites are the limited discussion space. Plus, they are not meant to be for every discipline. And to me, there is no discussion-inducing design that is present in reddit-like websites. It just seems like there is a need for a less complicated and directional platform.
Paperkast 101
Paperkast is a link-aggregator website for academic article discussion
You can share the link to the article you want on the site and send it to the Paperkast community. If your article gets enough votes, it goes to the main page and gets a chance to have more discussion. Top rated articles of the week can also be seen on the ‘Top’ page.
You can specify the article you are sending if you are the author by checking the box ‘I am the author’. Thus you can reply to the comments as an author of that specific article.
This does not mean that you can not send a paper to Paperkast if you are not an author. You can share the link to every article you see that is of interest and worth discussing.
The tag system exists to specify the disciplines to which the article belongs. I think with one or two tags, the scientific discipline of the article can be specified. Requests from the community are also welcomed as they can submit tag requests with ‘Meta’ tag. Therefore tags that are needed for a specific article would be added to Paperkast.
Filter is one of the key features of the site. After a certain period of time, the homepage will be filled with articles from many different disciplines. Users interested in specific topics will be able to filter the relevant tags and have a more focused website experience.
RSS. If you only want to follow articles that are on the main page or in a certain category, there are separate RSS feeds (i.e. Genetics) for both the homepage and the categories. Just write the tag name and put .rss at the end.
Trivia
The infrastructure of the site comes from Lobste.rs as people familiar with the concept can immediately notice. This open-source software meets all the needs of link aggregator sites. New features will also be added so easily.
Paperkast’s feedbacks from HackerNews and Lobste.rs communities can also be seen by clicking on the links.
Please send an email to paperkastpost at gmail.com for any inquiries and feedbacks.
