Paperbot is an command line utility that fetches academic papers. When given a URL on stdin or as a CLI argument, it fetches the content and returns a public link on stdout. This seems to help enhance the quality of discussion and make us less ignorant.
Paperbot can easily be turned back into an IRC bot with [irctk](http://gitorious.org/irctk)
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. When given a link straight to a pdf, which paperbot is also happy to compulsively archive it.
Paperbot can try multiple instances of translation-server (configured to use different ways to access content) and different SOCKS proxies to retrieve the content.
