Hello. I would like to share some information about a cool new project, alphaXiv, by arXiv Labs.
The project uses social-annotation and discussion-forum features to allow experts from across science, academia, and industry, and beginners, alike, to engage in open discussions about arXiv preprints and papers. Commentors can make use of highlighting to comment upon selections of documents.
The alphaXiv project delivers social forum experiences around scholarly and scientific documents. The project enhances scholarly and scientific communication and will, I think, accelerate progress and achievement.
In my opinion, the project would be benefitted by interoperability with ActivityPub/Fediverse standards and technologies. What do you think? Any thoughts or ideas in these regards?
That sounds like a fantastic project @AdamSobieski! As an aside, this reminds of the Web Annotations standard, I wonder if that’s still a thing? Could it be useful to what you’re doing?
The fediverse evangelist on my shoulder says, ‘yes! AP is good for everything’. But the ethical tech consultant on my other shoulder asks, ‘what do you anticipate the use of these standards adding to the UX of the project?’ Also ‘what features would it enable that couldn’t be done with something simpler?’
What about integration with NextCloud? So people can import a copy of a paper into their NC server, annotate it using the tools there, and then have that sent back to arxiv. NC implements a number of open standards for different features, including AP.
Thanks @strypey. Brainstorming, three initial possibilities for their project with respect to ActivityPub/Fediverse include:
Allowing new users to create alphaXiv accounts by logging in from Fediverse.
Allowing existing alphaXiv users to log in from Fediverse.
Allowing existing alphaXiv users to grant permissions for alphaXiv to post messages to one or more other Fediverse services, quoting their comments made on preprints and papers and providing hyperlinks back into discussions on alphaXiv.