GSoC 2025 Project #23 SciCommons :: a social-web tool for scientific discussion, interaction, rating, and peer-review (350h)

arnab1896 · March 3, 2025, 6:30pm

Mentors: Armaan Alam <armanalam032001@gmail.com>, JB Poline <jean-baptiste.poline@mcgill.ca>, Suresh Krishna <suresh.krishna@mcgill.ca>

Skill level: Intermediate - Advanced

Required Skills: If working on the front-end, familiarity with front-end development with NextJs, efficient Server Side Rendering, Tanstack Query, using Radix UI/ShadCn UI, modular design patterns are preferred. If working with NLP tools, familiarity with LLMs, NLP, using open sourced models, etc; familiarity with Slurm and working with clusters preferred.

Time commitment: Full time (350 hours)

Forum for discussion

About: Over the past two GSoC cycles (GSoC 2024 Project Idea 11.1 A social-web tool to facilitate rating and commenting on research reports (350 h) - GSoC - Neurostars), we have built SciCommons (http://www.scicommons.org), a portal to facilitate peer-review, article-rating, public and private discussion, as well as filtering for the scientific literature. This portal is nearing a public release.

Aims: This year, we invite GSoC contributors with experience in front-end development and design (Django/NextJS) as well as those with experience with NLPs and fine-tuning LLMs (for filtering the scientific literature). The goal is to substantially improve as well as democratize scientific discourse, and bring scholarly review and access back into the hands of scholars.

Website: http://www.scicommons.org

Tech keywords: Science publishing, social web, science portals, Natural language processing, large language models, AI.

abhishek2634 · March 8, 2025, 7:11am

@armanalam03 @suresh.krishna

Hello Sir,
I am able to run both backend and frontend but facing issue in localhost when try to call api endpoint I got no communities found. No articles found. But in hopscotch I get response 200 means the response is coming.

Can you please help me out ??
Thank You very much.

Regards
Abhishek.

armanalam03 · March 8, 2025, 8:37am

Hi @abhishek2634 , have you connected your db with backend?

armanalam03 · March 8, 2025, 8:39am

here endpoint is /api/articles

abhishek2634 · March 8, 2025, 8:50am

Hi @armanalam03 can you please tell me how to do that ? i followed readme of backend repo to configure.
I make a postgres db. i will DM you my .env file.

armanalam03 · March 8, 2025, 11:26am

Hello everyone, please go through SciCommons’ feature list for GSoC 2025

github.com

m2b3/SciCommons-frontend/blob/main/gsoc/GSoC_2025_Feature_List.md

# SciCommons GSoC 2025 - Feature List and Breakdown

## Project Overview
SciCommons is an open-source platform aimed at improving the scientific peer review process through better user experience and web application optimization. This GSoC, we focus on refining the frontend UI, following best practices, and enhancing performance. Contributors will work on UI improvements, optimizing API performance, and ensuring cross-platform compatibility.

## Primary Features
### 1. Frontend Redesign & UI Enhancements
**Adapting Kotahi’s UI Concepts:**  
- Improve the article browsing interface for better readability.  
- Gmail-style layout for managing research articles efficiently.  
- Store articles in XML format (like RSS feeds) - Refer arXiv.  
  
**Mobile-Friendly Interface:**  
- Ensure a fully responsive design with a Progressive Web App (PWA) approach.  
- Side-panel navigation with overlay functionality on mobile.  
  
**Article View & Interaction:**  
- Side-by-side comparison for discussions and articles.  
- Filters for sorting and searching research papers.  
- Improved comment system with threading.

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shreyamali01 · March 11, 2025, 4:22pm

@armanalam03 @suresh.krishna
Hi, My name is Shreya Mali and I am a third year B-Tech student from IIT Gandhinagar. I am interested in contributing to this project. I have already set up the project locally and created a PR. However, I am not entirely sure on how to proceed further, could you please provide some guidance on the next steps?

suresh.krishna · March 11, 2025, 4:46pm

@shreyamali01 - @armanalam03 will probably have some input with issues that you can contribute to fixing to get a better idea of how the site functions. also, please send me a link to your CV and or linkedin/github by DM. Finally, site-testing is always welcome - please test the site, find issues and file them in Github. thank you for the interest !

abhishek2634 · March 11, 2025, 5:35pm

Hi @suresh.krishna @armanalam03 can you tell me what need to be done in this issue.

Side-panel navigation with overlay functionality on mobile. ?

current situation

do you want the navbar which contain Home, communities,articles and post should come in a Side panel ?
I have created a figma design for it. Can you check ?

abhishek2634 · March 11, 2025, 5:36pm

If this needs some refactoring then i will do that also.
Thanks.

suresh.krishna · March 11, 2025, 5:48pm

@armanalam03 will reply in a day or two. please be patient.

armanalam03 · March 11, 2025, 5:49pm

Hi @shreyamali01, welcome! I will review the PR you made. Regarding further process, you can follow what Suresh sir has suggested. I am also making some changes on the test branch which may solve some issues listed in the issues panel. i will update the list soon. You can check into the test branch (for both frontend and backend) and try out the website. It would be great if you could find any new issues and list them into the issues section.
I would suggest you to go through the feature list of scicommons and try to discuss and work on them. All the best!

armanalam03 · March 11, 2025, 5:59pm

@abhishek2634 No. Actually the issue stated to have a sidebar which will overlay on mobile devices like this:

But now, for articles page, we want an interface just like Gmail (please refer feature list provided).
On this, there can be 3 partitions - left most for navigation, bookmarked articles, liked articles, etc…, middle partition for showing a list of all articles and on clicking any article, it should open on the right partition and not on a new page. Here is an example:

Feel free to suggest any ideas based on this. Also, think how we can make this mobile responsive.

abhishek2634 · March 12, 2025, 5:07am

Hii @armanalam03 can i get the Kotahi UI access. Where i can find it.
Thanks.

abhishek2634 · March 12, 2025, 8:15am

Hi @armanalam03 I made sidebar that overlay on mobile devices.
Take a look.

Do i need to make some changes ?
Thanks

shreyamali01 · March 13, 2025, 1:35pm

Thank you! I’ll go through the feature list and start working.

armanalam03 · March 13, 2025, 5:37pm

Sidebar is okay. Hamburger icon should be on navbar somewhere, maybe on the right end. We use ShadCN components library so I would suggest you to use that. Sidebar can also be added later because the list and contents on it can change based on what section or page user is on.
So we have two major requirements in frontend this year:

articles pages - as discussed above, we need an interface like Gmail or RSS feeds for articles page.
PWA - right now scicommons website is a PWA but we want it to be accessible on major list of devices along with efficient caching mechanism
mobile responsiveness
there are more in the feature list. I would suggest making some contributions in this section, or any ideas, enhancements, site-testing are also welcome.

abhishek2634 · March 14, 2025, 3:30am

Alright Sir, I will take care of that changing hamburger icon to right side and will make some contributions as where you mentioned.
Thanks.

abhishek2634 · March 15, 2025, 4:33pm

Hii @armanalam03 can you please tell me for what all devices we need to implement PWA. right now it is just for ios, windows11, and Android. ? Also can you tell me where i can find service worker files for the IOS, windows11 and Android platform ?
Thanks.

armanalam03 · March 16, 2025, 6:07pm

@abhishek2634 PWA should work on all OS, majorly android, iOS, macOS, Windows and Ubuntu. So it should be easily installable via chrome and safari mainly. Right now, we are using this package for pwa in nextjs: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@ducanh2912/next-pwa.
This library works well but we should also have a look at nextjs official docs for pwa and try to follow it. In PWAs, it is crucial to manage offline compatibility and caching behaviour.