ScienceFair

Developed out of a praiseworthy initiative of a few organizations such as Fathom Labs, the Dat Team, the Mozilla Science Lab (brought together under the name of Code For Science), ScienceFair is an open-source, cross-platform, peer-to-peer desktop library and research tool that aims to change the way you can access and use scientific literature. We say praise-worthy initiative because ScienceFair's main goal is to distribute literature conveniently and freely, directly to your computer's desktop.

The application can be deployed on your computer by following a typical, wizard-based installation process and it should work straight out of the bat, no extra components required.

For what it promises to be, the library features a surprisingly simplistic user interface, with no complicated menus or adjacent buttons, just a simple search bar on the upper part of the main window.

Start typing any relevant keyword and the app automatically looks it up through its datasources or local collection, namely the papers or articles already downloaded on your machine.

The results are sorted by relevance, and you can instantly start exploring them with the help of a very well-designed, built-in Lens reader.

It displays any article in two panes as follows: everything text-related on the left side and all the contextual information (figures, references, schemas) on the right.

Other than that, everything should come as natural as possible, and it should not take too long until you figure out everything this library's UI has to offer regarding functionality.

However, before we conclude, we would like to stress the importance of subscribing to the datasources, which are streams of articles regularly updated. Basically, by doing so, you make sure that your regular research always stays up to date.

To end with, it's quite clear that ScienceFair is a very useful tool for anyone even remotely involved in science and it will be somewhat interesting to see how well the project will withstand the trial of time and what the evolution will be.

The app is decentralizing the distribution, storage and overall control over scientific literature, and that's probably the most important aspect of this app. And to make everything better, it runs and looks like a modern application should.