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Many of my computational scientist colleagues used to use Google Reader to share and discuss new journal articles. The loss of Reader's social features killed that, and we have subsequently tried Google+ and Reddit, but neither seems to work nearly as well as Reader did for holding this kind of discussion. Does anyone have experience using a site they like for this purpose?

I'm aware of a few options, like http://annotatr.appspot.com/, that seem promising but appear not to be actually used much.

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There was a site called Phygg that aimed to do this for papers on arXiv, but it shut down due to low participation. – David Zaslavsky Feb 1 at 22:06
Can you describe a little better how the discussion went on Reader and what Google+ is lacking? – Bill Barth Feb 1 at 22:49
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With Google Reader you'd get tightly connected groups wherein one person in the group would share a paper from the journal/arxiv RSS feed and then a number of people would comment on it, often prompted by questions posited by the original sharer. These comments would be semi-private based upon how many people the original poster shared it with. – Peter Brune Feb 2 at 2:05
There have been quite a few attempts at providing a comment/review system overlay on top of the arXiv, including scirate.com (defunct) and science-advisor.net. – ihuston Feb 3 at 12:03
Mendeley has the groups feature, but I don't think that there is a discussion feature. – Jeremy Kozdon Feb 7 at 6:45
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Might I suggest http://scicomp.stackexchange.com ?

While the StackExchange system isn't the best - and indeed isn't designed - for "discussion", I've found that many "What did you think of this paper" type questions can be phrased in SE-compatible formats. CrossValidated has a semi-periodic "Journal Club" bit, and questions and musings about scientific papers come up a fair amount there.

I think if framed correctly, they might find a useful home here.

Generally though, I think the online discussion of scientific papers suffers from a few problems. Generally, the two I find the most problematic:

  1. Lack of a clear community to talk about papers in. Essentially, the problem your question is looking for an answer to. I haven't found a really good general purpose one, though I would love to if I did find it. There's blogs and the like, but even the ones talking about peer-reviewed papers are somewhat one sided in terms of their communication, and not great for anything but transient chatter.
  2. A hesitation to talk about that online. Among colleagues, it seems somewhat easier to summarize things like "Bad paper is bad", or slice apart someone's methodology. I'd be somewhat more hesitant to do that anywhere where my identity is both traceable and the conversation is saved for eternity (the internet).
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There is value in being able to be blunt with colleagues about your opinions on papers and techniques. I don't think that SciComp is the right place for that. – Jack Poulson Feb 2 at 0:26
I think the lack of anonymity in a public forum will be a deal-breaker for many due to academic politics and fear of reprisal, even if a review is balanced, tactfully pointing out both strengths and weaknesses. People prefer closed fora to avoid this drawback. – Geoff Oxberry♦ Feb 2 at 6:13
@JackPoulson I think that it depends on what you mean by 'discussion'. SciComp is probably the right place for certain types of discussion. Things like 'In the paper by EpiGrad et al., can someone explain to me what they mean by X'? – EpiGrad Feb 2 at 7:14
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@Epigrad: I think the idea is to do a serious discussion of the intellectual merits and disadvantages of individual papers, as well as areas of research. That's somewhat orthogonal to the goal of SE. – aeismail Feb 2 at 9:41
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