# paperbot

Paperbot is an IRC bot that fetches academic papers. It monitors all conversation for links to scholarly content, then fetches the content and posts a public link. This seems to help enhance the quality of discussion and make us less ignorant. When a link fails to lead to a pdf with the zotero translators, paperbot will not attempt further downloads of the paper unless paperbot was specifically spoken to.

<img src="http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/images/projects/paperbot.png" />

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## deets

All content is scraped using [zotero/translators](https://github.com/zotero/translators). These are javascript scrapers that work on a large number of academic publisher sites and are actively maintained. Paperbot offloads links to [zotero/translation-server](https://github.com/zotero/translation-server), which runs the zotero scrapers headlessly in a gecko and xulrunner environment. The scrapers return metadata and a link to the pdf. Then paperbot fetches that particular pdf. Sometimes in IRC someone drops a link straight to a pdf, which paperbot is also happy to compulsively archive.

* [zotero/translators](https://github.com/zotero/translators)
* [zotero/translation-server](https://github.com/zotero/translation-server)
* [patched translation-server](https://github.com/kanzure/translation-server)
* [phenny](https://github.com/sbp/phenny)
* [pdfparanoia](https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia)

Environment variables:

* SCIHUB\_PASSWORD - must be set to SciHub cookie
* LOGGING - optional: bot spams logs to a channel defined as "#" plus the value of LOGGING

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## TODO

It would be nice to use multiple proxies to resolve a pdf request.

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## active demo

say hi to paperbot on irc.freenode.net ##hplusroadmap

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## license

BSD.