A papertalk is a short video presentation about a scientific paper by one of the authors of the paper. It typically uses slides to present the key concepts and images of the paper and invites the viewer to read the whole article, which is openly accessible in the internet.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a couple of scientific conferences had to be moved to the digital world. As a consequence, hundreds of video presentations were created in a similar format and openly published. The organizers of the ICLR 2020 have created a platform to browse through these presentations and get individual recommendations. This project is a follow-up of the ICLR platform.

The word papertalk has two meanings: First of all it simply represents its format, which is a talk about a paper. Second of all, it points out that this platform should also be a place to talk about and discuss papers and recent scientific result. There is the possibility to comment publicly on a paper and also to write private messages to the presentator and other users.

The project was initiated by participants of the ICLR 2020. There is no commercial interest behind it or any other agenda - apart from creating a platform that benefits the scientific community and makes science more accessible and digestible.

At the moment, the costs (basically a server and a vimeo premium account) are relatively low and are covered by private donations. If the project grows and produces higher costs, a sponsor or free provider of the infrastructure is very welcome. A very discreet form of ads (as in the case of stackoverflow) might also be a possibility to secure the financial demand. There will definitely be no fee for using the platform.

If you want to help developing this platform, you can join the team of volunteer developers. Please write us on info(at)papertalk(dot)org.

If you have a paper that is published and freely accessible, you can produce your own papertalk (see next question). You upload the video to a common video platform (SlidesLive, YouTube or Vimeo) and the necessary information via the form at papertalk.org/upload. Many talks have also been embedded from external resources as being part of a conference. However, at the moment we do not offer this option for single talks.

There are several options, depending on your available software. Most presentation software (PowerPoint, Keynote, LibreOffice Impress...) make it fairly easy to record your slides with your audio narration. Also, there is a lot of open source for recording your screen, like e.g. OBS Studio (more examples).

If you want to manage your externally embedded papertalk, we have to verify that you are actually one of the authors of the respective paper. For this, please write us an email at info(at)papertalk(dot)org from one of the emails associated with the paper. Please do not forget the url or the id of your papertalk.

If you delete your account, you can choose if your papertalks should also be deleted or kept alive. In the latter case, the talks are transferred to a hidden user and can be reclaimed at a later point by you or another author. You can also transfer your talks to someone else by changing your email address and your username.