Show HN: Octosphere, a tool to decentralise scientific publishing

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

octosphere.social

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47 points

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crimsoneer

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8 hours ago

13 comments

verdverm ・ 8 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 ・ 8 hours ago

Ooh no, please do, but would love to hear more!
- verdverm ・ 8 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 ・ 8 hours ago

id also be curious to follow this if you have any links or resources
- verdverm ・ 8 hours ago
  
  This is probably a good jumping off point
  https://discourse.atprotocol.community/t/about-the-atproto-s...

rsolva ・ 3 hours ago

@criomsoneer: Check out Open Science Network (Bonfire), they are also doing interesting work in this space! https://openscience.network/

gnarlouse ・ 7 hours ago

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

mlpoknbji ・ 6 hours ago

Peer review should be disrupted, but doing peer review via social media is not the way to go.
- perching_aix ・ 5 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 ・ 7 hours ago

Right? This is kind of the dream.
naasking ・ 6 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 ・ 6 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.

11101010010001 ・ 4 hours 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.