Show HN: I built a simpler way to follow research papers–AI summaries and emails
TL;DR
OpenScience.ink scans PubMed daily for new papers across 8 topics: Long Covid, Circadian Biology, Psychedelic Science, CRISPR, GLP-1s, Gut-Brain Axis, Longevity and Aging, and mRNA Technology.
Key Points
- Every Monday, subscribers receive a topic-specific newsletter with the most relevant studies from the past week, summarized in plain English.
- The founder built the tool after personally struggling to parse PubMed while dealing with post-Covid symptoms – using ChatGPT as a first step, then formalizing the workflow.
- Launched as a solo project on Hacker News; free to use at openscience.ink.
Nauti's Take
A textbook 'scratch your own itch' project that delivers real value despite modest technical complexity. The topic selection is sharp: Long Covid, GLP-1s, and the Gut-Brain Axis are precisely the areas where new studies quickly become practically relevant and where the public is hopelessly behind the research.
Worth noting critically: eight fixed topics is a tight constraint – anyone needing oncology or neurology is out of luck. And AI summaries of primary studies have known weaknesses around nuance and study quality.
Still, more structured than a raw ChatGPT prompt, and for many users that is more than enough.
Context
Scientific literature remains inaccessible to most people – not from lack of interest, but because PubMed is poorly designed for non-experts and academic jargon creates real barriers. Tools like OpenScience. ink demonstrate how AI can act as a translator between research and the public.
The thematic curation is notable: instead of a firehose of papers, users get a weekly digest focused on specific, medically relevant fields. The underlying model – daily scraping, AI summarization, email digest – is simple but effective and scales well.
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