Search, collect, read and reuse the scientific literature.
ScienceFair is a desktop science library like nothing before. The main thing that sets it apart? Freedom from centralised control.
We aim to create a desktop experience for discovering, tracking, collecting and reading scientific articles that:
- is completely free from external control (e.g. by publishers or platforms)
- allows the user to customise their experience
- helps decentralise the scholarly literature
- promotes and integrates open data and metadata
- helps grow an ecosystem of open source tools around scientific literature
You can download installers or bundled apps for Windows, Mac and Linux from the releases page.
Please note that ScienceFair is currently pre-release, so there will be bugs - we're working hard to polish it to v1 release standard. If you'd like to report bugs in the issue tracker, that would be super helpful.
Some of the things that ScienceFair does differently:
- users can subscribe to any datasources they choose
- a datasource can be a journal (eLife is provided as the default), a curated community collection, a personal reading list...
- datasources are backed by peer-to-peer networks (using dat)
- anyone can create a datasource (tools to make this easy coming soon)
- papers are stored in JATS XML format - perfect for data mining
- basic data-mining and bibliometrics are built-in (see screenshots)
- we use the beautiful Lens reader - no PDFs
ScienceFair also follows a few simple design principles that we feel are missing from the ecosystem:
- we keep the interface minimal and clear
- incremental discovery is the way
- be beautiful
This project uses node v7, ideally the latest version. It also uses the two-package.json structure (what??).
To get a local copy working:
Clone this repo, then run
npm installto install dev dependenciescd app && npm install && npm run rebuildto install regular dependencies
cd back to the root of the repo and run
npm run devto start in development mode