Beyond arXiv?

In pondeirng next moves for scirate.com, one direction is to expand the site significantly beyond the arxiv.  Basically any publisher who has an rss feed or subscribes to the open archive initiative is free game.  Comments? 

4 Responses to “Beyond arXiv?”

  1. Paul Kinsler Says:

    Good idea … but which publishers and journals? I guess high-profile ones like PRL
    to start with would be best.

    As an alternative, you could allow users to nominate papers using (eg) the DOI
    most publishers supply? Then you wouldn’t have to process every rss feed from
    every journal.

  2. Paul Kinsler Says:

    better still, just add something for users to supply their own URL, which might
    be anywhere, in any journal; add a couple of keywords or subject categories,
    and let it show up just like all the stuff you hover up from arxiv.

  3. Marcus Silva Says:

    On the topic of arXiv, I think it would be great to associate each comment to a paper with a trackback. That way, when someone searches the arXiv they can see how many time the paper has been commented on via SciRate. It would be another way to introduce readers to the site (with the indirect help of arXiv), and it would also be able to disseminate constructive discussion going on at SciRate (such as the the comments on 0707.1037 and 0701.0021)

    Which brings me to another point: shouldn’t SciRate comments about an arXiv posting be associated with a version of the paper as well? By looking at the dates on can infer the version, but if the purpose of the date is just to relate what version the comment refers to, then why not just make the version the comment refers to obvious?

  4. FXPAL Blog » Blog Archive » SciRate.com: The social side of arXiv Says:

    [...] Include links to papers published elsewhere. While in math and physics arXiv.org may be the de facto publication venue, other disciplines such as computer science are more fragmented. SciRate would advance its agenda of being the academic commentary/review site by allowing readers to rate and comment on papers published in other venues such as  the IEEE CS Digital Library, which currently does not provide this useful capability. Since the abstracts are available from the digital libraries for free, and the contents are available to most members through a subscription, this commentary overlay can be a valuable service. The idea of introducing other content into SciRate.com was also mentioned in comments on the SciRate blog. [...]

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