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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?

#41

Post by alimoeeny »

barmstrong wrote: post #23
adbge wrote: post #17

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 acad…

Yep - do some crowd sourcing like HN for academics.

You all know, things like HN does not happen that often, specially in a world ruled by old professors. To build an HN for academics, first you need to be field specific (really narrowly specific!) and you need to be well known or supported in that community (this would make you an old professor!)

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

#42

Post by alimoeeny »

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…

not all fields are like that and not in all areas you want to be on the bleeding edge. For many purposes keeping up to date at journal paper level is more than enough.

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

#43

Post by alimoeeny »

Estragon wrote: post #20
bioinformatics wrote: post #3

Isn't that something that Mendeley is trying to do? I would be interested in seeing something like this and helping when and where needed.

Yes, it sounds like he wants Mendeley

No I don't!

As a user I need an intelligent filter with some sort of machine learning that can learn my interests by observing my ratings of some articles and rank the new articles automatically so that I won't need to scan hundreds of titles and tens of abstracts to find one important one.

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

#44

Post by alimoeeny »

_corbett wrote: post #19
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.

this would actually boost education and research performance and I am sure with the correct product and correct marketing could make good (!?) money.

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

#45

Post by alimoeeny »

Jerpi wrote: post #10

This problem isn't unique to academia. If I were you I'd create a few Pipes (Yahoo Pipes) and then use Google Reader as a front-end that supports sharing and commenting.

I agree I am surprised why Google scholar has not made such thing (maybe as a Google Reader feature).

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

#46

Post by alimoeeny »

T_S_ wrote: post #25

Have you tried Google Scholar Alerts? Works well for me. If that doesn't suit, consider it as a baseline for functionality.

I actually use Pubmed to get notifications on people or keywords that I am interested in. And I should confess that it is not that bad (but it could be much much better)

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

#48

Post by equark »

alimoeeny wrote: post #42
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…

not all fields are like that and not in all areas you want to be on the bleeding edge. For many purposes keeping up to date at journal paper level is more than enough.

True, but that isn't really that hard to do now. I can basically keep up to date by subscribing to top journals in my field.

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

#49

Post by borga »

jcruz wrote: post #28
_corbett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Mendeley (and use papers.app when I'm on a mac) and it has helped me more with organizing papers than in filtering them. What you see as an academic in the morning is a 100 papers staring you in the face and you fall back on pattern recognition at points if you don't have more than a few minutes. Whose names and institutions do you recognize? Which titles seem most similar to your line of research? But you…

I started JournalFire so journal clubs could post what they were reading online. You can follow clubs or individuals, and the articles they're reading or discussing will show up in your feed. Let me know what you think http://journalfire.com

I'm using it and trying to setup our journal club through it. Nice tool.

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

#50

Post by gsaines »

alimoeeny wrote: post #44
_corbett wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this would actually boost education and research performance and I am sure with the correct product and correct marketing could make good (!?) money.

I wouldn't bet on it. Making money in the academic institutional licensing world is tough, especially if you are marketing something that doesn't impact bottom-line figures for people who are concerned. Arguably this use case is as far removed from bottom line value adds as possible. In an optimal world you have a killer app that reduces University lead COA by 30% or something, but this would have to grow organically (so a lot of direct sales approaches are no good).

A friend of mine has been doing a lot of direct sales (quite successfully I might add) to institutions, but the reason he's making money is that his target audience is already doing a lot of number crunching, they have big budgets, and he's directly saving them cash. Something like this is probably a "nice to have" feature that would be near impossible to convince the school to pay for, to speak nothing of a worthy price tag (greater than $2k/yr for instance).

I sounds like a fun project, but I would not expect it to pay much, if anything. And an ad model's monthly revenue would be a joke.

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