

Academia.edu raises $4.5 million to help academics share research papers - RichardPrice
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/30/academia-edu-raises

======
impendia
> it also does very well in Google search results

Indeed. When in grad school (in Math) I googled my best friend's name (a
fellow grad student) and the academia.edu page turned out to be the second
hit. Turned out that they had scraped his professional website, as well as
pretty much everyone else's, and created a mediocre copy.

There was a tempting link at the bottom: "Are you [X]"? In a frivolous mood, I
claimed that indeed I was. I was asked for no verification whatsoever -- but I
was asked to set a password. I changed my friend's profile to "I'm pretty much
a putz who sits around and plays bridge all day", and it stayed that way near
the top of Google's search results for some time.

I might have felt guilty, but honestly I got the overwhelming position that
nobody could possibly take them seriously, they were just an SEO farm with no
content.

That link is gone now, and the site looks much more professional. I searched
for people I know... and people I know _are_ using it! (I confess to being
surprised.)

The front page is a bit ambiguous. "Share your papers" solves a problem no
academic has. But getting notifications when anyone from a list of people I
know shares a paper would be genuinely useful.

I'm not creating an account just yet, and my cynical instinct tells me that in
the long run this will prove to be more trouble for academics to use than they
find it worth. In any case they face the chicken-and-egg problem. But, this
site looks more useful than I had (ten minutes ago) imagined any such site
could be.

~~~
RichardPrice
When we first launched in September 2008, we did try creating a few thousand
unclaimed profiles as an experiment, seeing if academics would claim them.
Other sites like Spock.com and Spoke.com were also trying the 'claim your
profile' approach. It turns out that it's a really bad strategy, and, in
particular, you can't build a community like that. We turned the experiment
off after about 3 months. It was an interesting lesson in how not to build a
social platform. It's relatively difficult to know this a priori. You wouldn't
believe how many people since we launched in September 2008 have said 'Hey,
you should create profiles of academics at departments, and encourage them to
claim them'. We learned by experiment that that's just not a good strategy for
growing a community.

Thanks for your thoughts about the our current product. Many academics write
in to tell us that they are printing out their Stats Dashboards on
Academia.edu and are including them with tenure track portfolios, as they are
keen to demonstrate the global impact of their research, and we help them with
that. Many academics feel that a tiny number of people read their papers, and
they are incredibly happily surprised to see that, when they upload their
papers to Academia.edu, their Stats Dashboard reveals that quite a few people
read their papers, from several different countries.

You say you were in Math, so you probably used the incredible www.arxiv.org
for disseminating your Math papers. Some areas of Math and Physics (e.g. high
energy physics) are lucky enough for a lot of their community to be using the
Arxiv. For various reasons, the success of the Arxiv hasn't been mirrored in
the pre-print repositories of other disciplines. None of the other pre-print
repositories (SSRN, Repec) has got much traction - nothing close to the
traction of the Arxiv. One way I think about building Academia.edu is to bring
some of the magic of the instant distribution you find on the Arxiv to the
other 95% of research - biology, medicine, chemistry etc. We think that
bringing instant distribution to the 95% of research that Arxiv doesn't have
strong penetration in could yield huge societal dividends.

Faster sharing in, say, biology and medicine, could mean that cancer is cured
12 months before it otherwise would have. That would equate to millions of
lives being saved. It's widely thought that science right now is too slow, and
too closed. We are trying to change that, and accelerate research sharing.

~~~
impendia
Hi Richard, thanks and good luck to you!

A couple of thoughts on things I would love to see.

First of all, if research papers could be associated with discussions that
would be great. The arXiv is great for math, but you can't ask questions other
than e-mailing the author. Imagine that someone posted a paper, and you asked
some question "Doesn't XYZ also relate to ABC"?, etc., etc. There is some of
this on people's blogs I know but it would be great if there was a lot of this
in one place.

You might also read <http://meta.mathoverflow.net/> \-- MathOverflow
(mathoverflow.net) is great, but I feel there are a lot of pain points you'll
notice there, and there is room to do things which are outside of MO's scope.

Also, check out Tim Gowers's blog -- <http://gowers.wordpress.com/> \-- even
if you don't know abstract math, it's well worth reading. His math posts lead
to the kinds of discussion I would _love_ a more systematic venue for that is
not run by a single person.

I can more or less speak for my discipline (AMA), but I understand different
disciplines have _very_ different cultures! Even CS is quite different from
math from what I've heard.

Again, good luck to you!

~~~
RichardPrice
Thanks for these additional thoughts. I totally agree with you that it would
be wonderful to have discussions around papers. It is something that we want
to do.

I love MathOverflow. It's really a terrific site. Also I'm a huge fan of Tim
Gowers. His polymath project was awesome; I hope that's indication of what the
future of scientific collaboration looks like. We are definitely going to do
what we can to help push things in that direction.

Thanks again.

------
aheilbut
Google Scholar last week (soft?)-launched personal pages that seem have much
more comprehensive coverage of the literature and accurate automatic
attribution of authorship.

I'm not sure what to think yet, but this general space (including the
citation/paper archiving tools) is getting incredibly crowded. There's not
really a problem finding anyone's homepage (which I have much greater faith
will be kept free and available). And despite the evil publishers, if you're
affiliated with a university, there's no problem accessing papers. The only
hard part is deciding what to spend time reading.

~~~
RichardPrice
Distribution time is still very long in many fields - pretty much all fields
except a few sub fields of math and physics that use the arxiv. Most fields
see publication cycles of 6-24 months. I think in the future it will be the
norm for the distribution time for a paper within a given community to be
measured in hours and days, rather than months and years. We are trying to
make that happen with Academia.edu.

I definitely agree with you that it's hard to decide what to read. Each month
60,000 papers are published in the biomedical field alone. We think that
seeing what your friends are reading, as well as seeing which papers in your
field are trending right now, could really help with this.

The Google Scholar profile product is very different from what we are trying
to do with Academia.edu. There is no sharing on the Google Scholar profile
product, or News Feed where you can see papers from academics you follow.

I see the Google Scholar profile product as a way of Google Scholar enhancing
the accuracy of its search index, rather than as a way of building a research
sharing platform, with first class research sharing features. Google is
getting serious with social, as Google+ shows, but I don't think think the
Google Scholar team sees itself as building a social product, a la Google+,
for the research community. I could be wrong, but it just doesn't look like
that right now.

------
lowglow
I'm sorry, but don't .edu domains have to prove they are an academic
institution to qualify to use that TLD?

~~~
cyrus_
According to the eligibility requirements [1], yes. However, this was not
always the case and domains registered before 2001 were grandfathered in.
According to the whois record for academia.edu [2], it was first registered in
1999.

[1] <http://net.educause.edu/edudomain/eligibility.asp>

[2] <http://whois.educause.net/index.asp>

------
robotresearcher
I just tried it out. Clean design, looks smart and runs fast enough. It found
a bunch of my papers.

One important thing: I can't find a way to give/get formal references to the
papers. This means I can't use any of the papers I find here without googling
to find the text (or if I'm lucky, BibTex) of its conventional reference. This
is such a glaring omission that I wonder if it was intentional. Does anyone
know?

Also, scribd rendered PDFs look like hell, and the scribd frame captures
scrolling events. If the frame doesn't fit in a browser window (which it
doesn't by default) you have to move the pointer in and out of the frame and
scroll in both places to read a page of the paper. yuk.

~~~
RichardPrice
We're shortly going to switch to using Scribd's HTML5 embeds, which will
eliminate the double scroll bar that you see when viewing a paper (the iframe
scroll bar and the browser scroll bar). We should be switching to that in the
next few weeks after we've ironed out a few kinks. Our goal is to make a
really beautiful reading experience.

We have a few fields for each paper (title, abstract, other info etc), but I
agree that we could have more. As we build out the platform, this is
definitely an area that we'll be developing.

------
pwaring
Looks pretty smart, I really hope this project succeeds because as an ex-
academic I find it almost impossible to get hold of information about
research, and particularly papers.

One thing which could be improved though is the lack of canonical departmental
names. For example, if you look at the University of Manchester there are
entries for 'Classics & Ancient History' and 'Classics and Ancient History',
so you have to look at both to see all the members.

Localisation would also be good - in the UK we don't tend to refer to people
as 'Faculty' or 'Graduate Student' (lecturers see themselves as being tied to
a department or school rather than the mostly administrative faculty).

------
jahewson
It didn't take me long to find papers which are under the copyright of fee-
charging journals, which should not be shared outside the institution they are
licensed to - how do you plan to tackle this?

------
ig1
How does this compare to Mendeley ?

