About / Slack
The papers your lab
already discussed.
Connect a Slack channel and the papers your group shared there appear in its Curator feed — at their original dates, each with a short, anonymized note on what the lab said. A new group doesn’t have to start from a blank page.
Private groups · Public channels · Nobody named
I · What comes in
What comes in
Each paper arrives as a post in your group’s Discussion, dated to when the lab first talked about it, with the lab’s notes as a comment beneath it — a summary of the conversation, written without naming anyone.
History interleaves quietly: importing a year of Slack never rings a single notification.
- 01
Finds the paper links
A DOI, a PubMed, bioRxiv or arXiv link. Only the messages around a link Curator can match to a paper are kept; everything else in the channel is passed over.
- 02
Keeps the conversation around each
The thread under the link, or the two hours of messages that followed it. If the same paper came up in two of your channels, both count.
- 03
Writes one note per paper
A few sentences and up to three points, in the past tense, under an Imported from Slack label rather than a byline — the person who ran the import is not the person who spoke. A paper that was only linked, never discussed, says so.
II · What stays private
What stays private
Private groups only
Slack history imports only into private groups — the conversation was private on Slack and it stays that way here. If a group stops being private while an import is running, the import pauses.
Nobody is named
Curator never asks Slack who is who. User ids are replaced by pseudonyms before anything is stored, mentions, emails and phone numbers are scrubbed, and the note is written under the same rule as the Hive: speak collectively, never single anyone out.
Your group only — unless you choose
Nothing leaves the group unless a manager flips a paper’s switch from “Your group only” to “Your Group and Hive”. Off by default, one paper at a time, always behind a confirmation. Shared, the note becomes a public comment on the paper under the manager’s name, marked as synthesized from the lab’s Slack — still with nobody in the lab named, and un-shareable at any time.
Deleted when you disconnect
Disconnect the workspace — or revoke Curator’s access on Slack’s side — and the message excerpts Curator kept are deleted. Imported posts stay in the group until a manager removes them.
III · How to start
How to start
- I
Open your group’s settings
Slack history lives in the settings of any private group you manage — as its owner, an admin or a lab head.
- II
Connect Slack
Connecting imports nothing by itself. Slack asks you to authorise the whole workspace — that is Slack’s screen, not ours — and you choose channels here afterwards. Before the button lights up, you tick a short statement of what Curator will read, keep and delete.
- III
Pick the channels
Choose exactly which public channels to bring in; the import starts as soon as you do. Only those channels are ever read, nothing else in your Slack is touched, and private channels can’t be imported in this version.
- IV
Walk away
Slack lets Curator read about fifteen messages a minute, so a busy channel can take most of a day. The import keeps going without you, and the feed fills in as papers land. On Slack’s free plan, only the last 90 days of a channel are there to read.
Imports are a snapshot. Edits and deletions made on Slack afterwards aren’t mirrored, and Curator never re-reads a channel on its own — Import new messages, in the same settings, picks up where the last import stopped. Notes are written by an AI reading only the messages around each paper link, under the privacy rules above; Curator keeps the scrubbed excerpts it read so a note can be checked or rewritten, and deletes them when you disconnect. How Curator handles Slack data is set out in full on the privacy page.