I love something like this but something about having to log in to a proprietary service to read/comment/view markups just doesn't sit right. I wish this kind of stuff was built in more easily to PDF readers/writers. The modern state of commenting/annotating documents despite a decade of tablet computers is sad.
I first checked out Fermat's Library on account of the email list (the "Journal Club") that features a different paper each week. Even that is designed for maximal vendor lock-in: You can't download the paper. They don't even link to the paper's DOI so you can find another copy.
Additionally, like many social sites, the idea is to collect user-created value for free, centred solely within their control. That aspect echoes of the great problem with scientific publishing: Scientists produce information, and give it away to some corporation for free, which then charges the public to access it. The user comments, even if informative, are stuck on the site; you have to return to the site to access those comments.
Even if "All team members have an academic background and share the desire to make science more open and widely distributed" [0], there is no guarantee that the user-populated database of annotations will remain free or accessible in the future, since again, it's stuck on that site.
Could you elaborate more on what and why document annotation is in a "sad" state? Even with a regular PDF file there are many ways you can annotate it: highlighting, adding text box, adding comments, drawing shapes, freehand writing -- without resorting to third-party software. So either your need for offline annotation is pretty advanced, or that you are yet to update your OS/software to take advantage of those.
As for the online part you may be conflating your point about offline annotation. Fermat's Library is about annotation sharing: implementing this functionality without any sort of identity management appears to me that it would basically be asking for trouble (imagine you could send e-mails to anyone without logging into anything).
It's easy to casually throw around phrases like "log in to a proprietary service" to criticise something. Perhaps that sentiment is understandable, but it doesn't really move the conversation forward or lead to better solutions. In this case I think it's just simply missing the point: at least at this point in time Fermat's Library's mission doesn't appear to be about grabbing your identity for profit. So unless there is something particularly fishy about what they are doing, that sort of criticism seems unfounded.
If that's your concern then have a look at Semantic Scholar who are backed by Paul Allen's AI For The Common Good [1]. They are as open as it gets and do interesting things with NLP.
That said I wish Fermat every success. Any way that helps you drink from the firehose of publications is a much needed step forward. Even if there is so much more you can still do in this respect...
Fyi... in response sibling comments with phrases such as "proprietary service" and "vendor lock-in"...
I have no direct insight into the motivations of Fermat's Library but based on past interviews, the brothers Luís & João Batalha are 2 of the 4 founders and they said it's a side project and not meant to be a for-profit service. They're paying for server costs on their own. They also make the platform software (Margins) that Fermat's Library runs on free for other universities to use.
Their "day job" is a B2B sales marketing service which has nothing to do with science publishing: https://amplemarket.com/about
So the analogy would be Hacker News website being a "side project" of Paul Graham and YCombinator offering free access to some weblinks aggregation.
It's understandable that other commercial services that are paywalled make people distrust the future of a supposedly "free" service. I guess the same could have been said about Paul Graham back in 2007: "How do we know that PG won't paywall the HN website in the future and lock us all out of our free contributions of thread comments?"
Nobody but PG could have answered that hypothetical question and yet... here were are.
Yes, anything can happen and it's possible for the brothers to backtrack from their words but it would make them look bad for little gain. I think their intentional profit company Amplemarket has a better chance of making a lot of money than an academic annotation service. Perhaps we can use that in our Bayesian Probability of trusting/distrusting their future plans.
Combined with a Remarkable tablet or similar, it sounds like a very powerful tool/workflow combination :D
I could not really understand the licensing/business model though. There's no pricing info easy to find on the website?
