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I made an open source website to read free scientific papers (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago by Aurelius@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been wanting to make a modern and intuitive client for reading papers for a while. A huge thanks to arXiv for all they do

Check it out at OpenParchment. You can find the code here.

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

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[-] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 18 points 6 days ago

I'm confused. Anyone can read arXiv or Biorxiv. Why do we need a secondary website?

[-] Aurelius@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Thanks for your question! I wanted to bring a more modern UI + add features that I personally wanted while reading scientific papers such as saving bookmarks & creating custom Lists based on specific tags.

[-] Bongles@lemmy.zip 5 points 6 days ago

It seems the point is the different UI.

[-] mulcahey@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Thank you for this! Definitely cool to get a better UI for this.

However, I'll say that the biggest pain point w/r/t academic papers isn't Arxiv's interface. It's the papers themselves. PDFs are SO clunky, especially for those of us who enjoy reading on an eink screen. IMHO, the biggest unlock will be when someone figures out a way to easily convert academic PDFs to .epub while preserving the flow of the document.

Still, in the meantime, I'm very glad to have this new project. Thanks again for building! Adding it to my bookmarks

[-] Zerush@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 days ago

Very needed, thanks 🏆

[-] HotsauceHurricane@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

This is neat as heck. 👏👏👏👏👏

[-] VoxAliorum@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 days ago

Sry that I piggyback: Is there no federated paper publishing thingy?

[-] Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 days ago

It doesn't really seem like something that needs federation

[-] VoxAliorum@lemmy.ml 5 points 6 days ago

Well, it gives you complete control over your research and avoids relying on a service that could change it's experience at any time. It would also allow each university to host their own which might be politically easier to justify than "we use server xyz from uni zyx"

[-] quick_snail@feddit.nl -1 points 6 days ago

Post links, not images

[-] irelephant@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago

There's links in the post body

[-] quick_snail@feddit.nl 2 points 4 days ago

Yes, that's the problem that I'm identifying

[-] diegantobass@lemmy.world 41 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This is great! Do you know about the FOSDEM? The Open Research devroom would be an interested place to hold a talk about it :)

Edit: my comment is shameless self promotion but honest nonetheless

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 week ago

This is very cool, thank you! Sometimes when I post here, I link to a related research paper. A lot of research paper sites are a pain to use, and even harder to search with

The share menu seems to give me this

Collaborative Content Moderation in the Fediverse

https://openparchment.com/paper/2501.05871
https://openparchment.com/paper/2501.05871

How hard would it be to have some openparchment related links at the top of the article pages? Or perhaps a way to link to the articles details page directly?