{"id":1548,"date":"2009-08-10T07:23:15","date_gmt":"2009-08-10T14:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=1548"},"modified":"2009-08-09T23:24:55","modified_gmt":"2009-08-10T06:24:55","slug":"sciratecom-the-social-side-of-arxiv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=1548","title":{"rendered":"SciRate.com: The social side of arXiv"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing the “rant first, do research later” tradition of blogging, I had initially written<\/a> about the publish->filter model of academic publishing not having heard of arXiv.org or of SciRate. (Technically, I had heard of xxx.lanl.org, which became arXiv.org, but had never had the opportunity to use it.) Having been informed of the existence of these tools, I then related my experience with arXiv.org (here<\/a> and here<\/a>), and am now tackling SciRate.com<\/a>.\u00a0 SciRate.com offers a mechanism on top of arXiv.org<\/a> for registering comments on papers. Interestingly, arXiv.org\u00a0 provides links to a variety of bookmark aggregators, including CiteULike<\/a>, Connotea<\/a>, BibSonomy<\/a>, del.icio.us<\/a>, Digg<\/a>, and Reddit<\/a>, but not to SciRate. I wonder what politics drove that decision.<\/p>\n

It’s a simple system that provides a useful overlay onto arXiv.org, which itself does not support any commentary. In addition to comments, SciRate.com also allows readers to vote on papers, which (given enough votes and enough time) could be useful. The home page gives a listing of recent additions to arXiv.org (that can be filtered to specific archives), along with abstracts, the number of comments, and the number of votes for each paper. You can also see recent comments, although once there, there is no way to group them based on the paper that was being discussed.<\/p>\n

Some additions to this site would likely improve its utility and increase its user base.<\/p>\n