Connected Papers — Post Launch Community Update
Connected Papers launched in June and the response has been absolutely amazing. What started as a side project on the weekends ended up servicing over 200,000 users in just its first month out of beta. Talk about stress-testing…
In this post we’ll discuss what we’ve been up to since launch and our plans for the future.
Community reception
Frankly, we have been blown away.
We received hundreds of love letters in emails and on Twitter. Our user base is extremely global. We’ve had blog posts written about us in Hebrew, Turkish, Chinese, Spanish, Catalan and more than a few in English.
We just want to say — we love you back and we will keep working to make Connected Papers the best experience for researchers world-wide.
And we will try to keep it free, always.
Funding
When we launched Connected Papers we were planning to fund the service ourselves, as an altruistic side project. Given the huge demand, it became obvious that our personal budgets were not going to be enough.
During the last couple of months we’ve worked behind the scenes to secure funding for the servers and operations. We have partnered with two companies who support us financially, and we joined the “Microsoft for Startups” program which provides us with cloud credits.
We have also added a donation button on the website for individuals who are capable and willing to support us. The money goes directly to fund the servers and future development of the website. Thank you!
What’s new?
- More powerful servers:
We have migrated our servers to Azure cloud, and our devops infrastructure has been seriously upgraded — we are using more powerful machines, and graphs are now built twice as fast as they did at launch! We have also increased the number of graphs each user can build concurrently from 3 to 5. - Deepened partnership with Semantic Scholar:
We became official data partners of Semantic Scholar, whose wonderful team is assembling the biggest academic database in the world. Connected Papers is making extensive use of both their data and search APIs, and we are extremely grateful for their contribution to open science. - New Features:
We have received hundreds of feedback messages from the community and have prepared an internal roadmap for new features and improvements. This month, we have added an option to Download the Connected Papers Lists and added a button to Report errors in paper metadata.
Check out the full release notes or follow us on Twitter to get real-time updates.
Meet our sponsors
We have been extremely lucky to be in contact with two innovative companies who wish to support our project and the research community. We are very proud to have them as our first sponsors!
- DAGsHub: A platform for open source data science. They make it easy to share and collaborate on data, code, models and experiments. This team shares a lot of its values with us and is building next generation infrastructure for the machine learning community.
- ZenGo X: The team building a crypto wallet that is both secure and user friendly. Their research is focused on applied cryptography and distributed systems and they have been using Connected Papers from its very beginnings. Their co-founder, Omer Shlomovits, wrote a wonderful blog post about how Connected Papers impacts their research.
Would you like to support Connected Papers and become one of our sponsors? Drop us a line at sponsors@connectedpapers.com.
What’s next?
We have big plans and small plans. In the next few months we will continue to release updates to the core functionality and beyond.
Our plans include:
- A Connected Papers browser extension
- A way to highlight the connection between each paper and the origin of a graph
- A feature to allow users to view historical versions of the graphs for each paper and an option to re-run graphs with the latest database updates (useful for new papers that just came out)
In the long run we want to continue building products that propel the research experience into the 21st century, and allow researchers to access academic papers in an intuitive, global, open, collaborative environment.
Thank you to everyone who’s supported us on this journey so far. We are just getting started.
The Connected Papers team:
Alex, Itay and Eddie
