wtf is scinet-queue?

scinet-queue is a small command line tool written in Rust for managing paper requests on Sci-Net, a peer-to-peer service where researchers ask each other to fetch academic PDFs. The binary is called snq. The author describes the project as early stage but says builds for macOS, Linux, and Windows are tested in CI. You can grab a precompiled binary from the GitHub releases page or install from source with Rust 1.85 or newer using cargo. The typical flow is short. Log in once, import a list of DOIs (the unique IDs that identify academic papers) from a Markdown or text file, send a request for each, wait until peers upload a PDF, fetch those PDFs to a local folder, and then mark the papers you have reviewed as approved in the local queue. The README is clear that approval only records a local note. It does not release tokens or send any approval action to Sci-Net, so nothing happens on the network until you confirm. For things that need to be logged in, snq drives a real browser under its own profile. Chromium-style browsers are controlled through the Chrome DevTools Protocol and Firefox-style browsers through WebDriver BiDi. The tool does not bundle a browser and does not try to read cookies from your existing browser profile or the system keychain. You log in once through the managed profile and snq reuses that session headlessly afterward. Most commands accept a --json flag so an agent or script can consume the output. Subcommands include add, import, list, remove, check, request, watch, view, fetch, approve, session, browsers, and doctor. The queue itself lives in a plain .snq/queue.jsonl file in the current working directory, which makes it easy to inspect or version control alongside a research project.