
Academia.edu - Share research - jacquesm
http://academia.edu/
======
RichardPrice
Opening up research is a critical part of Academia.edu's mission. There are
four things we are trying to achieve with Academia.edu - ways in which we want
to re-shape science.

\- Instant distribution. Right now there is a 12 month time-lag between
submitting a paper to a journal, and the paper being published. We need to
remove that time-lag and introduce instant distribution of scientific ideas.

\- Better peer review. Right now the peer review process takes 12 months to
complete, and only surfaces the opinions of two academics - academics who may
be biased, uninformed about the subject area, or just in a bad mood when
writing the review. 2 people is too small a sample size. We need a faster and
more robust peer review system, one that surfaces the opinions of the entire
scientific community, and in real-time.

\- Multi-media. Right now, scientists only share papers in PDF form. We need
to bring about a science where scientists are incentivized to share data-sets,
code, videos, blog posts, and comments on all these media. Right now a lot of
the world’s scientific output does not get shared, because the system of
credibility metrics only rewards one kind of format, the paper. We need to
change this.

\- Open access. We need to bring about a world where a villager in India has
the same access to the world’s scientific output as a professor in Harvard.
When you open up access to the world’s scientific literature to the 2.5
billion people who are online right now, magical things may happen.

Critical to achieving change in science is understanding how the reputation
system works. Competition for funding is intense, and scientists optimize for
the kinds of reputation metrics that the funding bodies and hiring committees
check for. To achieve instant distribution, better peer review, multi-media
sharing, and open sharing, one has to build reputation metrics that encourage
that kind of activity.

Historically the main reputation metric in science has been the journal title.
But over the last 4-5 years, new reputation metrics have emerged in science.
Google Scholar pioneered the citation count: it released the count of how many
inbound citations your work has received, and scientists started to take that
metric and say to their funding committees 'this metric reflects well on me; I
would like you to take it into account when evaluating my work'.

Academia.edu has been pioneering the introduction of usage metrics: page view
counts for your papers. Our users regularly take screenshots of their
Analytics Dashboard on Academia.edu and submit them to their tenure committees
and funding bodies. There is a good case of someone including their
Academia.edu Analytics in their application for tenure here
[http://blog.academia.edu/post/23302130233/user-spotlight-
tim...](http://blog.academia.edu/post/23302130233/user-spotlight-tim-ritchie-
is-using-academia-edu-stats).

In the future there will be a family of reputation metrics in science, each
reflecting a different aspect of impact.

If you are excited about building this future of science, we are looking for
passionate people to join us. More about the company is here
<http://academia.edu/hiring>. Send me an email at richard[at]academia.edu if
you would like to chat further.

~~~
bo1024
Thanks for your hard work!

I think we all really appreciate the values of openness and ease of access.
But I have two questions along those lines. The first is why, as people asked
below, must one be a registered member to download a paper? The second is why
the terms of use contain this:

> _Fees. You acknowledge that Academia.edu reserves the right to charge for
> the Academia.edu Services and to change its fees from time to time in its
> discretion. If Academia.edu terminates your Membership because you have
> breached the Agreement, you shall not be entitled to the refund of any
> unused portion of subscription fees._

Do you anticipate charging for Academia.edu in the future?

~~~
RichardPrice
We plan to monetize via charging R&D firms for access to 'trending research'
data - data about which papers are trending in a given area of research. I am
a firm believer that the participants in the scientific community, and the
world in general, should not pay to share or access research. Participants on
Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, and other sites don't pay to share ideas, and
the same should be true of the way science works.

That said it would be unwise at this stage to rule out some kind of freemium
option. It is not the ideal option, but when trying to achieve a mission you
want to keep as many options open as possible. You don't want to box yourself
in in ways that may damage you later. There are also many good freemium
services (Github, Dropbox, LinkedIn).

To achieve a revolution in science, you need to build a huge community, and
change the behavior of scientists. There are many ways in which a site tries
to grow. Requiring users to sign up to download papers is one of those growth
channels for us. If it was a big deal amongst our users, we would change it.
But in practice it hasn't been an issue; our users don't mind this. Most
people read the HTML5 version that is displayed in the browser. If they have
to register to get a local copy of the paper, instead of paying $35 to get it
from a journal, they don't mind that. Over 2 million academics have signed up,
and we have about 4.5 million monthly unique visitors, so we have a fair
amount of data on this.

~~~
bo1024
I attempted to sign up today and found out that you have to be a member of a
research institution. Why is this? Doesn't this defeat much of the purpose of
openness (as members of research institutions usually already have access to
paywall-protected research anyway, whereas the general public doesn't)?

~~~
RichardPrice
You don't have to be a member of a research institution. On the signup page,
there is a checkbox to sign up as an independent researcher. See this
screenshot <http://cl.ly/image/1k2L0u1J1D3L>

~~~
bo1024
OK, I apologize then. That is a different screen from the one I found to sign
up at, but I see that my screen also has a checkbox at the bottom.

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anonymouz
I don't really see the advantage of this over personal homepages and/or the
ArXiv. Three problems that seem to come up immediately:

1.) It seems to be much harder to discover papers, in particular abstracts,
than on, say, arxiv.org or even Google Scholar.

2.) They seem to encourage the posting of papers to their site. Publishers
usually at least accept researchers posting papers to their own homepages and
to the ArXiv, as it is obvious that this is non-commercial and solely to
further the spread of scienctific knowledge. But Academia.edu seem to be a
commercial venture, so it is quite possibly that publishers will not accept
having papers posted there.

3.) It seems it takes a lot of Javascript to even display a paper, and then
they only appear as images, without any download option.

~~~
ryguytilidie
Just a few responses as I've been using the site for awhile:

1) The advantage over the personal homepage is that more people will see it.
Would a video get more views on your blog or on a video sharing site with lots
of content where people went to find content like that? 2) I think the idea is
that instead of using the current journal system, where professors try to show
how their work has an impact for their university by paying to put it behind a
paywall is just broken. Ideally professors will post straight to Academia and
bypass publishers altogether. if you want people to read your work, putting it
in an open, free forum where more people will see it AND you can track the
metrics of your work seems far preferable to paying to put your work behind a
paywall if you go the traditional route. I think they seem to acknowledge that
publishers won't be pleased if you post your already published work on
Academia. 3) The answer to the final thing seems to just be that it is a
really tough technical challenge. They seem to be a fairly small team and the
facebook motto that "the journey is 1% finished" seems to apply here. Imagine
the possibilities if this takes off. We currently think of journals as paper
with ink on the pages, but a site where all academics can share their work,
and we see new ways of sharing research, like executable code, rich media,
etc, could really improve academia and science in general IMO.

~~~
simonster
> 1) The advantage over the personal homepage is that more people will see it.
> Would a video get more views on your blog or on a video sharing site with
> lots of content where people went to find content like that?

In the world of Google Scholar, this isn't true. Google Scholar indexes
scientific papers and aggregates PDF links, without regard for what website
the PDFs came from. If no one cites your paper and it's not in a journal I
follow, I probably won't read it anyway. If I am sufficiently interested, when
I search Google Scholar, the PDF link on your personal website will be as
accessible as a PDF link anywhere else. (It may even be more accessible. If,
as others have suggested, Academia.edu doesn't let you download PDFs without
registration, then PDFs uploaded to Academia.edu probably don't get indexed by
Google Scholar.)

~~~
benl
Papers uploaded to Academia definitely do get indexed by Google. And we show
the full text of the paper inline on the page too, so the text is right there
after a user clicks through from the search result.

~~~
simonster
Yes, I just checked this. They get indexed by Google, but as HTML. There is no
PDF link because it's behind a registration-wall, which is still a good reason
to put the PDF on your personal homepage or arXiv instead.

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alexleavitt
The worst part of Academia.edu: you must log in to download the PDFs.

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LuisD
Guess it is something like <http://www.researchgate.net> ?

~~~
amirmansour
ResearchGate is very nice, but you have to request and wait for the full-text
of a publication from the author. In Academia.edu, you just get a direct link
to a full-text source or a straight up PDF download. At least that is how my
experience has been so far.

Another thing I noticed is that most of my professors and colleagues seem to
have active ResearchGate profiles. Academia.edu is still pretty new, so I only
found a few friends that had Academia.edu accounts.

It will be interesting to see where this all goes. I will personally be using
both sites, but I better get back to finishing my first publication :)

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schiang
It would be great if researchers and scientists can search for every single
published journal articles on Academia.edu. I used to be a chemist and my
college had a great search system. After I graduated, I lost access to that
database and have been looking for a tool that will allow me to look for
articles.

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tbirdz
This could be useful, except for the fact that you have to register to
download the pdfs.

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AYBABTME
I think it should provide a mean for searching/browsing papers without login
in.

~~~
ryguytilidie
<http://cl.ly/image/3t1D2Q1f1j1O>

I'm not logged in and just searched. Is this what you mean or are you talking
about something else?

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robertnn
I'm (very) annoyed that I had to link the account to Facebook. I tried
clicking "skip this" (or equivalent) but that link didn't work.

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appleflaxen
Who sponsors this? What does it do?

~~~
mjn
It's a social network for researchers. It's not sponsored by anyone; it's a
for-profit company. They managed to get an .edu address because the TLD wasn't
restricted until 2001, and pre-2001 registrations are grandfathered in.

