Kickstarter Launched for Social Reader

June 8, 2015

By Allison Proffitt 

June 8, 2015 | In late April, geneticist Yoav Gilad at the University of Chicago used Twitter to question the results of a paper authored by Michael Snyder of Stanford University. In a news story covering the exchange, Snyder told Nature that Gilad, “broke the ‘social norms’ of science by initially posting the critique on Twitter.”

So Twitter responded with a hashtag: #breakingsocialnorms. (It wasn’t a wholly original hashtag, unfortunately, so the conversation is buried in a whole host of unrelated abnormality.)

David Mittelman quickly joined the fray, arguing that "the "social norm" should be to embrace technology that facilitates better communication, not hide behind last century tech to obstruct it."

 

 

As it turns out, that is basically the thesis statement of Mittelman’s new venture and Kickstarter campaign launched today.

Today, N of Everyone—an organization of Mittelman, Rudy Marsh and Gareth Highnam—is launching a Kickstarter Campaign for its first product: Reader, a mobile-loving application for interacting with published research in a way that’s social, collaborative, and granular.

As a Reader user, you can comment on papers within the platform at the very line or image you are reading. The platform can grab sentences and tweet them (or post to another preferred social network) directly. Reader keeps tracks of portions of the paper you are interacting with—where you’ve placed a bookmark, or tweeted an excerpt, or shared an image—and organizes your work so you can easily navigate it.

Citations pop up where work is cited and Reader flags other spots in the paper where the same work is cited, and gives a little context for what in that particular paper is relevant. Powerful search lets you look for something within the paper, the comments, the figures, and the citations and their abstracts.

All of this in a super clean interface designed particularly for mobile devices. There’s no flipping back and forth between windows or sections of the paper. Everything expands in line, and away again with a tap.

The Five Year Plan 

And the platform is designed to grow socially as well. Mittelman sees opportunities arising to establish domain expertise within Reader. As you publish papers, review them, and interact with Reader, tags and keywords for your work are collected. Then users who are highly ranked in an area can recommend individuals or work, and the expertise behind that recommendation would be evident.

Because Reader reads XML and images, it’s intended to be as broadly accessible as possible. So far all of the papers in PubMed Central work with Reader. For other publishers—Mittelman mentions Nature, BioMed Central, PLoS—the N of Everyone team would build a “converter” for their content.

Reader will always be free to the user, Mittelman said. It’s a promise he made for GCAT, the Genome Comparison and Analytic Testing tool he and colleagues released in 2013. He’s kept that promise with GCAT, and the N of Everyone team includes some of his former colleagues.

Gareth Highnam was a Ph.D. student in Mittelman’s lab at Virginia Tech and joined him at Gene by Gene afterward. Mittelman calls him a, “great programmer and bioinformatics expert”; Highnam continues to moderate the open source resource, GCAT, and bioplanet.com. Rudy Marsh also worked at Gene by Gene by way of Zynga. He specializes in user engagement and social media.

But Mittelman, who joined Tute Genomics as CSO in January, also has a business plan and a long term vision for Reader’s future.

Publishers could support Reader for their content. By being able to more clearly see which parts of papers are attracting the most attention and which figures are most popular, publishers can foster more community with their readers.

He said he’s already had publishers reach out to him about using Reader for peer review. “I think it would be cool in the future if three reviewers were critiquing a paper collaboratively and they could see each other’s comments. You could actually have a nice productive, private discussion between the reviewers.”

Shrinking the Unit of Publication 

The product showcased in the Kickstarter campaign won’t be the final iteration of Reader, and Reader won’t be the ultimate science publishing solution, but Mittelman believe it’s time for a sea change in the way scientists communicate their findings. Scientific publishing first meant publishing one’s life’s work in books. Then scientific societies were born, and researchers began to share shorter articles throughout their careers published in journals.

Now it's time for something new. He doesn’t hold that opinion alone.

“The format and mechanisms for presenting science have barely changed in 350-years, and there is a huge need for new ways of displaying this information that truly embraces the flexibility and power of the web,” Scott Edmunds, Executive Editor at GigaScience, told Bio-IT World.

“Whether this change can come from the legacy publishers is questionable, as previous attempts by them have produced products such as ReadCube that seem to have been more focussed on bringing Hollywood-style digital rights management into publishing. With so many vested interests in maintaining the status quo sustainability and development will be challenging, but I applaud their commitment to making this 100% open and free, and their independent minded and novel approach of using Kickstarter to try to do this. Being huge fans of open peer review, we at GigaScience would be very interested in leveraging platforms such as this to allow more collaborative and real-time review of papers.”

There are other platforms tackling this problem. Some of the early viewers we spoke with mentioned areas of possible overlap with Utopia Documents, mabye eLife's Lens or some of the RVpublisher tools. But everyone we spoke with encouraged the effort. 

"I think it's impossible to say which of these solutions will end up being the most successful," said Daniel MacArthur, Associate Director of Medical and Population Genetics at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. "I think the most important point is that people are recognizing that the current methods for discussing science are broken, and that new solutions are needed. The more different attempts we see to solve this problem the more likely we are to find one that works."

MacArthur has played with an early version of Reader and was impressed. "I like the idea of reimagining the scientific paper from the reader's perspective -- there is something so anachronistic about still reading static PDFs of papers, flipping back and forth between figures and text, in the age of the internet. This is obviously still in very early development, but I hope it works," he said.  

Mittelman says that N of Everyone is simply testing a hypothesis: “If there was a better way to navigate and discuss literature, then the discussion would happen. Right now, there’s been limited attempts and limited successes trying to get folks to discuss online, and I think it stems from not having the right user experience.”

And even if Reader isn’t the perfect solution, Mittelman thinks it’s a good start.

“We shouldn’t confuse bad technology and user experience with "Can’t be done", or "Shouldn’t be done". It just means there’s no good way to do it yet,” he said. “That’s what why we want to test some hypothesis for how to do things better... why we want to do a Kickstarter and build these tools, because we may not have the right solution, but we doubt there’s no solution to engage people in a way that’s more meaningful and doesn’t require you to wait six months for publication.”

As the social norms of science publishing change, Mittelman sees the unit of publication further decreasing. “Maybe it gets smaller. Maybe you don’t publish 20-page papers anymore, maybe you publish one-page papers. Maybe eventually the blog and the scientific paper kind of blend together and there’s a new unit of publication.”

That may still be a long way off, he concedes. “I don’t want scare anyone off or sound crazy, but it’s worth considering!”