Sorry for the delayed reply—this launch has gone far better than we anticipated and our servers and infrastructure have been overwhelmed, even after increasing our auto-scaling ceiling twice… So the last day was a bit hectic :)
This is very relevant to your question.
Connected Papers was built with altruistic intentions, and indeed we expected to fund the servers ourselves—this would be our effective altruism cause. But, it looks like with the demand we’re seeing our budgets would not be enough.
We’re now brainstorming various solutions, including pro plans for the product (we’re committed that there will always be a free version that’s at least as good as what we’re providing now) and sponsorship from cloud providers. For the time being, we’ve added a donation button which will go directly to funding the servers—active donations would be a good indicator that some users are willing to pay for the service.
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The other (much smaller at the moment) risk for Connected Papers is that it does not own the data on which the graphs are built. We are relying on external datasets like the Open Corpus by Semantic Scholar. This means that if at some point they change their license it could impact our ability to provide service or the quality of our graphs. This does not seem like a big risk at the moment as we’re actively engaged with Semantic Scholar and have their blessing (e.g. they tweeted about us).
In addition, any errors in the datasets reflect poorly in our graphs. In fact, it appears that our graphs are a very good method to detect bad entries in the DB. Ideally we would want to allow users to report bad entries and close the loop with Semantic Scholar at the database level.
tl;dr
We need to solve server funding, we rely on external sources for the data on which graphs are built.
Hi!
Sorry for the delayed reply—this launch has gone far better than we anticipated and our servers and infrastructure have been overwhelmed, even after increasing our auto-scaling ceiling twice… So the last day was a bit hectic :)
This is very relevant to your question.
Connected Papers was built with altruistic intentions, and indeed we expected to fund the servers ourselves—this would be our effective altruism cause. But, it looks like with the demand we’re seeing our budgets would not be enough.
We’re now brainstorming various solutions, including pro plans for the product (we’re committed that there will always be a free version that’s at least as good as what we’re providing now) and sponsorship from cloud providers. For the time being, we’ve added a donation button which will go directly to funding the servers—active donations would be a good indicator that some users are willing to pay for the service.
---
The other (much smaller at the moment) risk for Connected Papers is that it does not own the data on which the graphs are built. We are relying on external datasets like the Open Corpus by Semantic Scholar. This means that if at some point they change their license it could impact our ability to provide service or the quality of our graphs. This does not seem like a big risk at the moment as we’re actively engaged with Semantic Scholar and have their blessing (e.g. they tweeted about us).
In addition, any errors in the datasets reflect poorly in our graphs. In fact, it appears that our graphs are a very good method to detect bad entries in the DB. Ideally we would want to allow users to report bad entries and close the loop with Semantic Scholar at the database level.
tl;dr
We need to solve server funding, we rely on external sources for the data on which graphs are built.
I would 100% subscribe for a pro version and recommend it to others FYI.