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

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

#13

Post by Elite »

hooeezit wrote: post #6

Looks like what you want is a version of this: http://techlens.cs.umn.edu/tl3/ Read an article about Techlens on ACM here: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1297268&dl=GUIDE&#...

The ACM abstract gave a good overview of what the site was supposed to do, but when I went to the actual site, it was horriblyi designed with no clear description of what the service was supposed to do.

Maybe if the OP Gave a very well designed application using existing implementations it would take off.

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

#14

Post by retube »

equark wrote: post #2

This needs to be done well, I agree. Everybody I know in academia has had this idea, so there is demand. However, journals are far too late. In many disciplines everything is shared a year in advance via working papers. These are often posted on authors webpages or on conference pages before anywhere with a formal rss feed. I want to subscribe to specific authors and be confident I get things first. This will be hard…

> In many disciplines everything is shared a year in advance via working papers.

Yes, absolutely.

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

#17

Post by adbge »

It sounds to me like maybe you should go one further than just creating a superb academic RSS reader, and instead try to create an online community for academics -- a la reddit for PhDs.

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.

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

#18

Post by _corbett »

I've faced the same problem with info overload, even with the new astrophysics subfields introduced by arXiv. I am an active user of papers.app and have used Mendeley in the past; it helps with organizing but filtering is still a challenge.

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).

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

#19

Post by _corbett »

boskone wrote: post #4

Well here is the rub of it. Are you willing to pay a monthly subscription fee? How much?

if you could convince labs themselves to pay for it, it'd be a money maker, although this may require more direct marketing at first. many academic institutions hold subscriptions/licenses in the $10k range.
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