The biggest difference IMHO is when comparing to something like Wikipedia or Stackoverflow. I wish the fabric of scholarly communication similarly allowed for browsing reviews, updating papers, commenting with new references, etc.

I think this is a valuable idea. There are online archives that allow for paper updating for academics, like SSRN, but as a CONSUMER of academic literature, the land is pretty barren.

The difficulty in such a thing would be the journals and database companies are holding on to their exclusivity and profit motives with an iron fist, so unless you want to get sued into oblivion, you'd have to stick with open source or accessible articles, so you'd need to either specialize in disciplines that have moved away from closed-source enough that the tool wouldn't have massive holes in it.

Also determining which new references and reviews have relevance (like if anybody can comment with new references, who goes through to check they're actually relevant or say what the person says they say?), preventing academics/administrators from gaming the system if it DOES get popular, etc. In open source, this is crowd-sourced, but for some academic fields the number of people who are qualified to speak on a matter is extremely small.

/academic librarian thoughts

Now THAT might be a realistic technical goal & business opportunity.

The legal costs make this a non-starter unless it's done by a giant company. Who would, in my opinion, ruin it, and the odds of enough academics complying with a big tech company are small imo.

It'd be viable for fields that don't use/rely on for-profit or closed journals, but I don't know if the money to run it would be there, especially since the odds of the big Schol Comm players suing is still there, because it'd be worth it to ruin the tool/effort before it can challenge them.

Building this would be my dream job, but hahaha no.

Generally, anyone writing a paper about something that could benefit from bugfixes would love to accept them, but doesn't have the time or resources to actually do so - unless there's another paper in it. If they have somehow managed to find enough personal time to have a hobby project, then they probably do accept bugfixes - and you should get them in before that person burns out.

It also doesn't happen enough to design for - I once presented a fairly open-source contributor friendly project at SciPy that I hoped would be compelling (it was about modeling the zombie epidemic), actively asked for help, had set up a couple open requests of varying levels of complexity.

I think there was one pull request total?

The juice just didn't end up being worth the squeeze.