SciRate is an open source rating and commenting system for arXiv preprints. Papers are upvoted and discussed by the community, and we sometimes play host to more in-depth peer review.

Bug reports and feature requests should be submitted as GitHub issues.

Development is best done locally using docker-compose:

docker-compose build

In order to run the app, you will need a local_settings.rb file, and a config/database.yml file. You can copy these from the CI versions:

cp local_settings.rb.ci local_settings.rb
cp config/database.yml.ci config/database.yml

Then, spin up all the servers,

docker-compose up -d

You need to make sure elasticsearch is fully up; it can take 10 seconds or so, you can verify with

while true; do sleep 1; curl localhost:9200/_cat/health; done

You can check to make sure something is at localhost:3000. You should see SciRate.

If nothing is there, it's possible something went wrong. One common message is something like A server is already running. Check ... tmp/pids/server.pid. Deleting ./tmp/pids/server.pid fixes this issue.

From here, you can run the tests.

docker-compose exec web rspec

After that, you can sync to arXiv.org and then play around with the system locally:

docker-compose exec web rake arxiv:feed_import
docker-compose exec web rake arxiv:oai_update

and visit http://localhost:3000 and you will be looking at SciRate!

It may not be possible to make new users locally. If you get stuck, you can disable the unless verify_recaptcha code block in app/controllers/users_controller.rb and it should work.

There is a fairly comprehensive series of unit and integration tests in spec. Running docker-compose exec web rspec, if the entire docker-compose system is up, will run them.

Locally, you can run ./deploy.rb. You will need ssh access to the production server for this to run successfully.

On the server, the logs are in /home/scirate/scirate/log/.

The website updates automatically every hour with a sync.sh script in a crontab on the server. The crontab uses a file lock via flock.

• It first calls arxiv_paper_sync.rake. This checks if it's the right time to update, and if so, downloads new papers via arxiv_oai_update.rake. This uses the custom arxivsync package.
• Then it calls arxiv_author_sync.rake. This checks if it's the right time to update, and if so, links the arXiv author identifiers specified by users with the list of papers on arXiv.org via arxiv_authorship_update.rake.

In the database, each user (in users) has an account_status column. Change this to admin or moderator for extra powers on the site.

• Both admins and moderators can hide inflammatory recent comments.
• Admins can see a dashboard https://scirate.com/admin, set a global alert (i.e. for announcing upcoming site maintenance), and act as other users.
• A user can also have account_status set to spam.

There is also a feature to lock comments of a paper. This can be done by changing a flag in the database (there is an open issue to make this accessible in the frontend #335).

• Maintained by Kunal Marwaha
• Previously maintained by Noon van der Silk
• Original website by Dave Bacon
• Bill Rosgen
• Aram Harrow
• Draftable