Paperbot is an IRC bot that fetches academic papers. It monitors all conversation for links to scholarly content, then fetches the content and posts a public link. This seems to help enhance the quality of discussion and make us less ignorant.
All content is scraped using [zotero/translators](https://github.com/zotero/translators). These are javascript scrapers that work on a large number of academic publisher sites and are actively maintained. Paperbot offloads links to [zotero/translation-server](https://github.com/zotero/translation-server), which runs the zotero scrapers headlessly in a gecko and xulrunner environment. The scrapers return metadata and a link to the pdf. Then paperbot fetches that particular pdf. Sometimes in IRC someone drops a link straight to a pdf, which paperbot is also happy to compulsively archive.
