[HN Gopher] Show HN: Cassyni - Relaunching Academic Seminars
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       Show HN: Cassyni - Relaunching Academic Seminars
        
       Hi, this is Andrew (arhpreston) and Ben (benjyk) from Cassyni
       (https://cassyni.com). We both completed PhDs in physics before
       going on to found Publons and Kopernio, companies that were
       acquired by -- and became a part of -- Web of Science, a product
       researchers on HN may be familiar with.  It is well known how
       important academic seminars are for networking, promoting your
       research, and keeping up with latest developments. But the scale is
       under-appreciated: by our estimates more than _1 million_ academic
       seminars were happening every year. And then Covid came along...
       As a result many seminar series are now online and recorded using
       solutions that cobble together tools like Zoom, Google Sites and
       Sheets. This all more or less works but is painful and time
       consuming to operate. Our co-founders, researchers at Imperial
       College London and Texas A&M, experienced this firsthand. With
       their input we set out to build a tool to take the pain out of
       organising a seminar series. The idea is that in just a few minutes
       you can set up a professional looking seminar series and begin
       inviting researchers. We take care of the tedious process of
       setting up an online presence and working with speakers to find a
       time slot that works for them, collect their bio, abstract,
       promotion and more.  We've been operating in beta for several
       months now. You can see some of the seminar series that are up and
       running on our homepage. These range from your standard
       departmental series (ABI Tuesday Seminars:
       https://cassyni.com/series/SeqaVR2QzFGw9XDyyJpSmY), to a series
       about a specific tool for scientific simulations (PyFR:
       https://cassyni.com/series/RJ4AcXzinEkeYbdLjAcMAa) through to a
       journal that brings in authors to talk about influential papers (J.
       Comp Phys.: https://cassyni.com/series/MU2jWEjQNwTiDTtMjUsZri).
       Note that you can click on the archive tab of each series to watch
       recordings of previous seminars.  As you can see, these are not
       just standard departmental seminars; the shift to online has
       removed geographics barriers, enabling different types of seminar
       series to develop. What they all have in common is that they are
       helping communities to form around different kinds of research
       topics, and they all give you information and nuance you wouldn't
       find by reading the related publications alone.  On the attendee
       side, we've done some nifty work to integrate with Zoom so the live
       experience is better (instead of a name in a Zoom meeting you can
       see the profile of people in the room and participate in a live
       Q&A: https://imgur.com/a/ssGPjbT). In the longer term we think
       Cassyni can help to make seminars and their recordings a searchable
       (e.g., check out the slides we've automatically extracted from the
       video and search for "flux" here:
       https://doi.org/10.52843/cassyni.ibj908) and citable (as you can
       see from the previous link public seminars on Cassyni get a DOI and
       are indexed in CrossRef) part of the sphere of human knowledge -- a
       complement to the published literature.  We thought we'd share what
       we've built with HN in the hope of getting some feedback about what
       we can improve. If you are a researcher please do take a look and
       let us know what you think. And if you're interested in setting up
       a seminar series drop us a line (help@cassyni.com) to let us know
       where you came from and we'll organise an HN discount for you.
        
       Author : arhpreston
       Score  : 10 points
       Date   : 2021-08-20 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | MattGaiser wrote:
       | For those of us who are not academics, what makes a seminar
       | distinct from perhaps a typical industry conference and how come
       | existing solutions such as Pheedloop do not fill that gap well?
        
         | arhpreston wrote:
         | The best way to think of it is probably that Cassyni is to
         | webinars as an academic journal is to blogs.
         | 
         | As an example, we issue a DOI for each seminar, meaning their
         | metadata are indexed in the same systems that are used by
         | journals to manage and report on citations. This turns the
         | recording into something that is much closer to the formal
         | sphere of human knowledge and can be included in typical
         | academic reporting and evaluation structures.
        
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       (page generated 2021-08-20 23:02 UTC)