Mentors: Armaan Alam <armanalam032001@gmail.com>, Mohd Faisal Ansari <fa058593@gmail.com>, Suresh Krishna <suresh.krishna@mcgill.ca>
Skill level: Intermediate – Advanced
Required Skills: If working on the front-end, familiarity with Next.js, React, Server Side Rendering, TanStack Query, and component-based UI systems such as ShadCN/Radix UI is expected. If working on the backend, familiarity with Django and REST APIs is useful. For AI/NLP work, experience with LLMs, NLP pipelines, and open-source models is preferred. Experience with browser extensions or research tools is a plus.
Time commitment: Full time (350 hours)
About: Over the last few GSoC cycles, we have built SciCommons (https://www.scicommons.org), a web platform to support open scientific discussion, article reviews, ratings, and community-driven evaluation of research. The core frontend (Next.js) and backend (Django) are now stable and in active development and testing, and the platform is approaching a wider public release. The project is now moving into a phase of expanding features, improving usability, and building tools around the platform.
Aims: This year, we invite GSoC contributors to help extend SciCommons in several directions: improving the front-end experience, building a browser extension to connect SciCommons directly with relevant websites, adding AI-based tools for a range of tasks including literature discovery and summarization, and developing features for community-run journals and editorial workflows. The goal is to make SciCommons not just a place to comment on papers, but a complete environment for discovering, reading, discussing, and organizing scientific knowledge. The work will focus on the following areas:
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Front-end and UX improvements for reading, reviewing, and discussion workflows
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A browser extension to save papers, view discussions, and annotate articles from anywhere on the web
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AI tools for semantic search, recommendations, and paper/discussion summarization using open-source models
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Journal and community management features (editorial flows, moderation, curation, integrations)
Website: https://alphatest.scicommons.org
Tech keywords: Science publishing, social web, science portals, Next.js, Django, browser extensions, natural language processing, large language models, AI-assisted literature discovery.