
Academia.edu, The Social Networking Platform For Researchers, Raises $11 Million - RichardPrice
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/26/academia-edu-2/
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linhat
So, is anybody here _actually_ active on academia.edu? Asking, since as a
computer vision researcher (3D reconstruction, obstacle
recognition/identification, augmented reality, ...) I am constantly looking
for scientific resources, and to be frank, it is quite annoying because it can
become really time consuming.

So a genuine question, is the site worth signing up for? I remember when
mendeley just started, there was lots of excitement about it, mainly because
it was sort of marketed as _the last.fm of research_ (giving you _good_
recommendations for _your_ scientific interests), but then it turned out to be
just _meeh_ (getting bought by Elsevier didn't help much ;-).

Also, on a side note, are there any other good sites doing something similar
out there (like a reddit/HN for _insert your research interests here_ type of
site) that are actually any good? I'm sure there must be a lot of other
researchers active on HN...

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drewda
I've been a regular user of Mendeley, not for recommendations--that's what
journal TOC alert services are for--but just for managing my bibliographies
and preprint PDFs. I'm allergic to Endnote and I got tired of Zotero's
sluggish speed (not that I've tried using it in a few years). Mendeley has
been a nice replacement.

(All that said, I really do hope Zotero does well, since it's open-source and
not owned by a major commercial publisher.)

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thelettere
Still kind of shitty - you have to log in to view or download anything. Google
scholar is much more useful and open.

~~~
chalst
The major use of the site is that you can follow researchers who interest you
and be notified when they upload new papers (and likewise allow people to
follow you) - the notifications for Google Scholar are not terribly useful for
that.

~~~
thelettere
You can do that with google scholar

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_alerts?view_op=list_alerts...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_alerts?view_op=list_alerts&hl=en)

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taariqlewis
It's all fun and games until we someone asks what's the DAU/MAU on that puppy.
How many of those are actually active and what are they actually doing when
they login.

~~~
mjn
The only reason I've ever logged in is that they hold the PDFs hostage unless
you do so...

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diminoten
How did it get a .edu domain? Is it an accredited institution?

~~~
csa
This domain was grandfathered in before October 2001.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu)

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jgamman
after Mendeley I'm not going anywhere near something like this. and seriously,
isn't the web itself the best publishing mechanism ever invented? why are we
trying to fit everything into a single service provider model? academic makes
webpage using awful html and notepad with copies of their articles. other
researchers track the people they're interested in. RSS? not my !@##@ problem,
use a site checker plug-in. it's free, extendable and has no lock-in risks.
the root cause problem here is academic promotion incentives almost force you
into publishing behind paywalls.

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fluidcruft
How does this compare to researchgate? I know lots of people that use
researchgate.net, but nobody I know uses academia.edu.

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cantastoria
I'd love to see their business plan.

Academics on the whole are not a good demo for advertising and don't want to
pay for anything related to their jobs/research unless they have absolutely no
other choice. How are they going to make money? I can't even see them being a
good acquisition.

~~~
csa
I'd love to see their business plan, too. As of now, since they don't charge
anything, you have to assume that the users are the product.

From what I can make of the publicly available information (mostly interviews
with Richard), AE's primary business model is to spot research trends early
and then sell this information to customers (e.g., industry, governments,
etc.). One seemingly simple example of this would be to identify trends in
drug/medical research and sell it to the large pharmaceutical companies.
Anyone who has worked in academics knows that the lag between when research is
done and when it is published is substantial (months to years). A drug company
getting 12 month research head start on the competition would be _huge_. I can
only imagine that this carries over to a large number of other fields
(economics, aeronautics, finance, any field related to energy, etc.).

CHARGING FOR DATA

A few other ideas about how they could charge institutions for data (the
current job board doesn't seem to be very data-driven):

\- Information about trending majors and research areas so that the number and
type of faculty matches at a research school matches the market demand (e.g.,
of research journals, grants, students, etc.).

\- Headhunter info for schools looking to recruit promising young academics as
either students or professors. Elite schools would likely pay big money to
find the multitude of really smart, really talented, and really motivated
students who just never think of going to an elite school (there are A LOT of
them). Additionally, some extremely capable grad students get lost in the
tenure track professor mix because they didn't attend a name/feeder school
(for whatever reason).

\- Honeypot for Big Bro.

OTHER THINGS TO CHARGE FOR

A few things AE and their competitors could probably charge for (note that I
think that grad students are a much larger market than their professors):

\- Marketplace for editing.

\- Autogenerated lists of "interesting" articles/books based on user input
(e.g., articles the user likes, keyword analysis of a draft of a paper, etc.).
The tech and algo concepts exist to do this, but I think the people how can do
it have bigger fish to fry.

\- EndNote competitor that works _really_ well. All the pieces for a
(near-)perfect product are out there, but no one has really put them together
in one place.

\- Repos for grad student work and papers and/or for research teams. There is
a lot of potential here, many of which I would have loved to have on both the
student and professor ends:

a) tracking student research progress (e.g., data collection commits, draft
commits, etc.)

b) collaborative resource development and/or sharing (e.g., data sets,
citation lists, etc.)

c) peer review (both inside and outside of a student's school and department)

d) aggregated publication outlets for stance pieces or small exploratory
studies that rarely get published but often provide valuable insights

e) a variety of writing models for other students to learn from

FOR THE GOOD OF ACADEMICS

A few things that they could reach to do for the good of academics but
probably won't due to minimal profit potential:

\- Facilitate the development of a large number of online journals with decent
standards. All of the pieces are there on a site like AE, but there needs to
be a ringleader or evangelist. This proliferation of peer reviewed
publications with a decent level of standards would remove a lot of the
politics from academic publishing and would let the market of ideas determine
which research is most important.

\- Connecting researchers (both students and academics) with similar research
interests. You would think the internet would make this easy, but my personal
experiences and the experiences I have witnessed of others suggests otherwise.

\- Tracking and teaching people about their intellectual heritage -- for
example, what are the branches of Whiteheadian philosophy, which branch are
you in, and how does your branch compare and contrast with other branches.

Richard is a smart guy, and I wouldn't be too quick to bet against him. While
AE isn't the most pleasant site to use in its current state, I think there is
a lot of potential for something great to happen. I look forward to hearing
more about AE's journey to bring that greatness to be.

[edited for formatting]

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mbq
IMO the only useful thing about A.edu is that they have a good position in
search engines and give you an information about clicks -- so it's like Google
Analytics for your papers and profile. The rest is sadly either cumbersome or
redundant.

