I thought about the idea of a graded discussion, too. However, if I were a student and confronted with a discussion of nothing but research papers (or links to research papers), I'd pull my hair out.
I have taken a course in which the instructor created "showcase" pages for our work. She had a module with a page for each student. The pages were editable, so we could each present our individual project. That worked well in terms of the class being able to see all of the projects. The caveats are that pages cannot be graded, and that anyone could potentially edit a classmate's page.
Again, this goes back to these fundamental questions:
- How many students?
- How long are these research papers?
- What is the purpose for the students to have access to their classmates' papers?