Fermat's Library Cofounders João Batalha and Luís Batalha | Summary and Q&A

TL;DR

Vermont is a platform for annotating scientific papers, aiming to facilitate open science collaboration by allowing users to add annotations to difficult or unclear parts of papers.

Key Insights

• 🔎 Vermont is a platform for annotating papers, aiming to bring the experience of offline journal clubs online.
• 📚 Papers can be dense and difficult to understand, making annotations and additional content valuable for readers.
• 🌍 Vermont aims to push science towards open science, including open data, open publishing, and easier collaboration.
• 📝 The founders of Vermont have technical backgrounds and started the platform based on their own experiences reading and discussing papers.
• 💡 Collaboration around papers could involve forking papers, forking research data, and remote collaboration between scientists.
• 🤝 Online collaboration platforms like GitHub, Wikipedia, and Stack Overflow show the potential for similar platforms in the scientific community.
• 💭 Impact in science can be measured through metrics like citations, but better proxies for impact are needed.
• ✍️ Clear and accessible writing is important for impactful scientific writing, and annotations can help clarify concepts for readers.
• 📔 There is potential for building a tool to annotate books, allowing readers to see highlights and annotations from others.
• 🌟 Vermont is a side project for the founders, so profitability and sustainability are not immediate concerns.

Transcript

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Questions & Answers

Q: How does Vermont's platform facilitate collaboration and open science?

Vermont's platform allows users to add annotations to scientific papers, which can help clarify difficult concepts and contribute to the understanding and improvement of research. This collaboration is facilitated through the sharing and discussion of annotated papers.

Q: How does Vermont plan to encourage open data and open publishing?

Vermont aims to support open science by promoting the sharing of research data and open publishing. This includes making data used in research easily accessible, publishing code and algorithms, and avoiding paywalls by publishing in open-access journals.

Q: Can Vermont's platform be used in fields other than science?

While Vermont currently focuses on scientific papers, the concept of annotating and collaborating on content can be applicable to other fields as well. For example, there is potential for annotating and collaborating on books, especially in the context of educational or introductory texts.

Q: What are the challenges that Vermont faces in building a platform for scientific annotation and collaboration?

Vermont faces challenges such as finding a balance between publishing papers quickly and ensuring quality through peer review, developing metrics to measure the impact and value of annotations, and considering issues around copyright and intellectual property in publishing annotated books. Despite these challenges, the founders remain committed to improving the peer review process and making scientific knowledge more accessible and collaborative.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• Vermont is a platform for annotating scientific papers, founded by four individuals with technical backgrounds.

• The idea was inspired by their personal experience of reading papers together and presenting them to each other in an internal journal club.

• The goal of Vermont is to move towards open science by enabling the annotation and sharing of scientific papers, as well as promoting collaboration among scientists.