Online Journal Club on Flexible Electronics
For many years, people accumulate personal collections of academic publications of interest in paper form. As such collections grow with time, more file cabinets and book shelves are needed for storage. First, space becomes a problem. Second, finding a specific paper could be a headache, even if the collections are well categorized.
As more and more publications become available online in recent years, people gradually switch to collect electronic versions, e.g. PDF files of papers. These files are often stored in local hard drives. Space is not an issue anymore. But again, locating a paper from hundreds of files in tens of folders still might be a heck of efforts.
Besides the difficulty in searching, other common shortcomings include:
- Locally stored, limited access flexibility.
- Personally owned, not easy to share with other people. As a result, the scale of personal collections is often limited.
- Redundently collected. Consider this: a same gem paper is manually archived by thousands of people individually.
- Statically and passively maintained. Lack of interactions among people sharing common interests.
Any better idea? Here comes Web2.0, which is all about online collaboration. Among the numerous tools enabled by Web2.0, CiteULike could be the one able to solve the above issues for us. A previous post in AMN explored the possibility to form online journal club based on CiteULike. Here is an example.
