

The Story Behind a Radical New Idea: A Social Network for Academia - RichardPrice
http://www.inc.com/srikumar-rao/richard-price-academia-edu-users.html

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memracom
Sorry to say that I almost fell off my chair to see a claim that a social
network for academia is a radical new idea. This is an old established idea
that has been with us for over 150 years. Academia is one of the most
successful social networks ever. Sure, there are changes in how it functions
but I wouldn't call that radical. Academics were the early adopters of the
Internet, creating thousands of mailing lists before the web came along.

I read lots of academic papers and I find them in two ways. One, is that I
google for them. And the second is by following up references in papers to
find a particular author's web page where they usually have lots of info about
their work including a complete list of papers that they have published. Often
these are very old school web pages that were started circa 1992 or so. The
WWW only went public in 1990.

Ever since academia moved onto the Internet in around 1990, they have been
innovating with bibliographic servers that go far beyond a web search engine.
It is nice to see some more incremental improvements but the hype about it
being radical and new does more harm than help.

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schimmy_changa
I can't see how this is a "radical new idea". It's a good idea and very
valuable if executed correctly, but taking an existing, proved model (aka
facebook) and tweaking it to work for academics is not new and hardly radical.
I'm not hating on the idea, I love more tools for academia, but the title is
hyperbole.

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21echoes
i thought the same thing at first, having just read the title, but it seems
it's really not about the "social network" part at all. this is more like
arXiv.org in that it's a platform for academics to publish their own research
papers.

~~~
gjuggler
Have you tried actually logging in? This is not quite arxiv.org — I'd estimate
that 90% of the engineering going into academia.edu has gone towards features
on par with LinkedIn for their spamminess. I signed up, and was asked about 10
times to connect to Facebook, Gmail, invite my friends, etc.

They have some interesting features (such as feeds of recent articles
organized by journal you can sign up for), but by far the most important
feature of academia.edu is growing academia.edu.

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j_m_b
This is the first I have seen of academia.edu. Everyone I know are on
researchgate.net. First comment was about orcid.org, another site I just found
out about. Talk about market saturation and social network fragmentation!

~~~
guynamedloren
Very, very fragmented. I'm building something that is in some ways competing
with Academia.edu, and I didn't even discover them until I was _deep_ into the
market research. But maybe I'm just a crappy researcher :)

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srgseg

      It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide
    

Looks like they're hitting critical mass. I love the idea that this is
liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers that our
taxes are paying for.

I'm also delighted that Khosla Ventures are giving this room to breathe.
"Khosla does appear to be increasingly open to investing in startups that have
a social mission and a business model. This is often referred to as 'impact
investing'"

~~~
mjn
> liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers

Annoyingly, you have to register an account and log in to download any papers.
The uploader doesn't have any control over this. It's still free, but
distinctly worse than arXiv, or heck, even the classic academic homepage with
PDFs on it, both of which already exist.

I would guess this also inflates their membership count, which is, I assume,
the reason for the requirement. I myself never use academia.edu when I can
help it, but I have an account because I must sometimes log in when someone
has chosen to host their paper there instead of somewhere better.

~~~
zissou
Although not primarily in the discovery space, if you're a user of arXiv, you
may be interested in the n-gram viewer our lab made:
[http://arxiv.culturomics.org](http://arxiv.culturomics.org)

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frabbit
I don't know whether it's Rao's write-up or not but this sounds like absolute
rubbish written by yet another "business management" "consultant".

Is Hacker News about hacking or about lame web-2.0 bubble business bullshit?

~~~
SkyMarshal
About 20% hacking, 80% bbb. But I find so many gems in that 20% it's still one
of the best single sources on the net for hacking.

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afandian
Worth mentioning Orcid.org. Solves broadly the same problem. No need to get
profit involved.

~~~
smokinn
One of the problems with for-profit is that the company is likely to sell its
community out if they think that'll make them more money. See: Elsevier buying
Mendeley and the backlash from that: [http://www.theguardian.com/higher-
education-network/blog/201...](http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-
network/blog/2013/apr/10/elsevier-buys-mendeley-academic-reaction)

This Onion talk put it really well:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_m6U1f9o)

~~~
X4
@smokinn thank you for the great video! I didn't know that the onion had such
quality talks. I personally use Mendeley, but only to obtain other people's
Papers and sync my Bibtex fies.

@afandian NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia.

Generally speaking, I really don't get what's good about those platforms. Can
anyone try to explain why people keep using it for another thing than peer-
pressure?? I mean you upload a damn pdf with some meta-data attached to it.
What's so hard? Use XMPP/IRC or Usenet for the communication and you're set, I
must be dumb. I don't see why there is a need for those "new social networks".
When email/mailing-lists/irc/xmpp/usenet/forums etc. already exist.

~~~
afandian
Sorry I didn't understand your comment "NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for
academia". Could you clarify?

~~~
X4
Not worth it for academia means, that academia deserves something better than
a vendor lock-in, by some closed-source software. It deserves a medium that
doesn't stand in it's way, but empowers students/professors, scientists and
other people, instead of depowering them by centralizing all power to one
login provider.

Academia is about innovation and sharing knowledge. A gatekeeper or a closed-
source platform inevitably creates a bottleneck that slows innovation and
knowledge sharing down. Furthermore, a social network as Academia requires a
medium that adapts to it's need, not the other way around, therefore an
optimal solution can only be opensource.

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dobbsbob
This places some of our greatest resources into a closed box not available to
the general public.

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philip1209
How does one obtain a .edu domain name?

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mjn
Either you have to be a legitimate academic institution, or you aren't, but
are grandfathered in because you acquired the domain before 2001. This case is
#2.

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jlebrech
I thought that was how facebook started

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shaohua
April fool?

