Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

Posted by crimsoneer 5 hours ago

Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing(octosphere.social)

Hey HN! I went to an ATProto meetup last week, and as a burnt-out semi-academic who hates academic publishing, I thought there might be a cool opportunity to build on Octopus (https://www.octopus.ac/), so I got a bit excited over the weekend and built Octosphere.

Hopefully some of you find it interesting! Blog post here: https://andreasthinks.me/posts/octosphere/octosphere.html

33 points | 12 comments

verdverm 5 hours ago|

Are you aware of the current efforts by researchers on Bluesky to build a new researchers platform on ATProto? (Forget the project name at the moment)

If not, same handle over there, I can get you in touch with them. Or hit up Boris, he knows everyone and is happy to make connections

There's also a full day at the upcoming conference on ATProto & scientific related things. I think they com on discourse more (?)

crimsoneer 4 hours ago||

Ooh no, please do, but would love to hear more!

verdverm 4 hours ago||

Go chime in and share your work here: https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/about-the-atproto-s...

That'll get us connected off HN

I think Cosmik is the group I was thinking of that has also put out some initial poc like yourself

Johnny_Bonk 4 hours ago||

id also be curious to follow this if you have any links or resources

verdverm 4 hours ago||

This is probably a good jumping off point

https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/about-the-atproto-s...

11101010010001 1 hour ago||

Yes publishing is broken, but academics are the last people to jump onto platforms...they never left email. If you want to change the publishing game, turn publishing into email.

gnarlouse 4 hours ago|

Integrate them peer review process and you’ve got a disrupter

mlpoknbji 3 hours ago||

Peer review should be disrupted, but doing peer review via social media is not the way to go.

perching_aix 2 hours ago||

Has a bit of a leg up in that if it's only academics commenting, it would probably be way more usable than typical social media, maybe even outright good.

crimsoneer 3 hours ago|||

Right? This is kind of the dream.

naasking 3 hours ago||

Calling it peer review suggests gatekeeping. I suggest no gatekeepind just let any academic post a review, and maybe upvote/downvote and let crowdsourcing handle the rest.

staplers 3 hours ago||

While I appreciate no gatekeeping, the other side of the coin is gatekeeping via bots (vote manipulation).

Something like rotten tomatoes could be useful. Have a list of "verified" users (critic score) in a separate voting column as anon users (audience score).

This will often serve useful in highly controversial situations to parse common narratives.