I like the idea. But speaking as a research mathematician, I cannot imagine that such a system will can be adopted in the math communities. You have quite a lot challenges to solve in this domain:
1. Only very few people actually read a certain paper. Of course it depends, but usually papers are only interesting for a handful of mathematicians world wide.
2. The access to papers is not centralized or can be controlled. You cannot know who read which paper. Often preprints are circulating via email. Published papers may be behind a pay wall.
3. How do you want to detect whether somebody really read a paper, let alone understand it?
4. Surprisingly many mathematicians are eccentric and hostile against computers (and programming). E.g. older people refuse to use new tools like LaTex and prefer TeX. I only know a few mathematicians, who use git/hg to make collaborative writing easier. Usually people emails documents back und forth instead. Cannot imagine, that a critical mass of mathematicians starts logging into some fancy new app. I also suspect that many people don't want to be tracked for what they read. After all, research is competitive.
Cannot speak about other research communities though.
I like the idea. But speaking as a research mathematician, I cannot imagine that such a system will can be adopted in the math communities. You have quite a lot challenges to solve in this domain:
1. Only very few people actually read a certain paper. Of course it depends, but usually papers are only interesting for a handful of mathematicians world wide.
2. The access to papers is not centralized or can be controlled. You cannot know who read which paper. Often preprints are circulating via email. Published papers may be behind a pay wall.
3. How do you want to detect whether somebody really read a paper, let alone understand it?
4. Surprisingly many mathematicians are eccentric and hostile against computers (and programming). E.g. older people refuse to use new tools like LaTex and prefer TeX. I only know a few mathematicians, who use git/hg to make collaborative writing easier. Usually people emails documents back und forth instead. Cannot imagine, that a critical mass of mathematicians starts logging into some fancy new app. I also suspect that many people don't want to be tracked for what they read. After all, research is competitive.
Cannot speak about other research communities though.