Hi all,<p>I’m one of the engineers at AI2 that helped make this happen. We’re excited about this for several reasons, which I’ll explain below.<p>Most academic papers are currently inaccessible. This means, for instance, that researchers who are vision impaired can’t access that research. Not only is this unfair, but it probably prevents breakthroughs from happening by limiting opportunities for collaboration.<p>We think this is partly due to the fact that the PDF format isn’t easy to work with, and thereby make accessible. HTML, on the other hand, has benefited from years of open contributions. There’s a lot of accessibility affordances, and they’re well documented and easy to add. In fact, our hope long-term is to use ML to make papers more accessible without (much) effort on the author’s part.<p>We’re also excited about distributing papers in their HTML form as we think it’ll allow us to greatly improve the UX of reading papers. We think papers should be easy to read regardless of the device you’re on, and want to provide interactive, ML provided enhancements to the reading experience like those provided via the Semantic Reader.<p>We’re eager to hear what you think, and happy to answer questions.