
The end of Academia.edu: How business takes over - merraksh
https://www.diggitmagazine.com/column/end-academiaedu-how-business-takes-over-again
======
benl
Hi, I'm Ben, CTO of Academia.

Everyone who works at Academia would love it if we were able to make advanced
search free.

When we first decided to build a premium account, we also made the decision to
not take anything out of the free account. Strange as it may seem, the free
account never had full-text search because we couldn't justify the cost of
building it (full-text search of 20MM PDFs at our traffic levels is expensive
to operate). We built it for the premium account because people asked for it
in our initial research - and we would love to be able to eventually move it
into the free account.

On the team we all agree that we want to keep building premium features in
order to make the platform sustainable. The author of this article takes the
view that advanced search is not a feature that should be paid-for. My view is
that we intend keep building features until we have something that is worthy
of his support. The support of the academics who use and enjoy the platform,
both in free and paid accounts, is what will keep it around and growing for
the long term.

~~~
merraksh
I think it would be a little easier to accept (and probably easy to implement)
if, in addition to title search, authors and keywords were also searchable. A
search for my PhD advisor's last name results in 0 papers, though I uploaded a
few papers that he and I coauthored.

~~~
tomcam
> he and I coauthored

…which means that you wrote them and he, ah, "co-authored" them?

~~~
merraksh
Yes, I did write most of the text, but without his guidance on the research
and on what to write about more in depth, there would have been no article.
He's been the best advisor. Don't you dare say bad things about him! :-)

~~~
tomcam
Nice to hear!

------
jccalhoun
I have never liked academia.edu. I always found it pointless. If I want to
share my academic work I'll put it on my own web site.

I also found it weird that they had a .edu address (apparently they bought it
before the rules were put in place and so they are grandfathered in)

Whenever I searched for a paper and google found an academia.edu link my
process was, click on the link, oh crap it wants me to log in, what's my
password again? fuck it, I'll just go to scihub.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> If I want to share my academic work I'll put it on my own web site.

The academic world is suffering from the same tendency to keep within a walled
garden as the rest of society. It's hard these days for anyone to get people
to regularly visit their blog even if the quality of the posts is high,
instead people only click on links shown to them on Facebook. Similarly, my
colleagues in my field generally don't visit my own website even though they
are aware it's there and has links to my papers and other relevant content,
but if I post a new paper on Academia.edu, I immediately get a number of views
from there. It’s sad.

~~~
jccalhoun
That's really interesting. I never check academia.edu. Few of my peers have
ever mentioned its existence. Whenever I find a paper to read it is either
from google scholar or a works cited of something I've read.

------
RichardPrice
Hi, I'm the founder of Academia.edu.

The author of the article objects to the introduction of a freemium model on
Academia.edu, and specifically to the idea of advanced search being in the
premium set of features.

Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the
internet, available for free, and to develop a more rigorous and efficient
peer review system. Free access to academic research makes the world a more
equitable place, and rigorous and efficient peer review accelerates the pace
of scientific and scholarly research.

Academia launched in 2008, and now around 35 million people use the site a
month. Around 19 million papers have been uploaded, and are freely available
on the platform. Forty percent of Academia’s users are from developing
countries and would otherwise have limited access to academic research.

In order to achieve Academia’s goals, Academia is working to become a
sustainable operation. In order to do that, we introduced Academia Premium,
which includes extra features such as Readers, Mentions, Expanded Analytics
and Advanced Search.

\- Readers tells you who is reading your papers

\- Mentions alerts you when papers are uploaded mentioning your name

\- Expanded Analytics provides a more detailed look at what kinds of people
visit your profile and how people find your papers

\- Advanced Search allows you to find exact keyword matches in the full text
of every paper on Academia

In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided that
features related to the mission of the company should be free. This means that
features related to open access (free access to uploading and downloading
papers), and features related to peer review (sessions, recommendations) are
free. As we add new features to Premium, we will continue to ensure that
features related to the mission (open access, sessions, recommendations) are
free.

We are grateful to all the academics who have contributed to Academia, and we
will continue to serve academics from around the world.

~~~
danra
> Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the
> internet, available for free

> In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided
> that features related to the mission of the company should be free

That's absurd. Open access to an ocean of articles without the ability to
search through them is meaningless.

While you do allow search in titles, thus providing _some_ ability to locate
relevant material, presenting content search as some premium feature in 2017
is ridiculous.

~~~
impendia
> Open access to an ocean of articles without the ability to search through
> them is meaningless.

As an academic mathematician, I disagree. The ability to search through
articles' content is great, but being able to access an article given its
authors and title would already be quite valuable.

I hope that academic researchers eventually converge on a completely open-
access model, involving commercial enterprises to the minimum extent possible.

But researchers are too preoccupied with other things to make this a priority.
For the moment, I am happy to see anyone taking on entrenched interests (e.g.
Elsevier), from whatever angle. The status quo is bad enough that I welcome
"creative disruption" of essentially any sort.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
There are network effects this search limitation creates over time. We can
probably even predict some of them. Here are a couple of superficial guesses:

\- less creative titles

\- longer titles to cram keywords in (ie. an academic form of clickbait)

The point is artificial limitations will produce unknown effects on the system
being limited. Offering premium search is an uninspired approach that will
have an unpredictable impact should Academia.edu become the status quo.

I'm neither condemning nor condoning premium search. Merely warning against
accepting arbitrary limitations simply because it's better than what you've
currently got.

~~~
impendia
I believe that you're overestimating Academia.edu's potential influence.

The whole reason that Elsevier et al. can make so much money is that
_researchers can keep doing exactly what they have always been doing_.
Researchers themselves don't see the publishers' invoices, let alone pay them,
and they are under essentially no pressure to cut costs. In particular,
Elsevier has no influence whatsoever in academia -- they just make shitloads
of money.

Managing academics is often compared to "herding cats"; it is uncommon for
academics to be very willing to realign themselves according to external
factors. (Exception: grant funding agencies.) Anyone trying to make money in
this industry should keep this in mind.

------
digitalzombie
I stumbled across academia.edu trying to grab a syllabus from some university
to find books to supplement my learning.

It was so spammy.

I didn't get why the professor website point all his research towards
academia.edu.

He could have posted it on his website or github.

The website demand from the get go your info and you have to create account to
even get stuff. It's similar to quora.

Quora survived with its quality like posts/answers but I still disagree with
this type of model.

~~~
vog
Pardon my ignorance, but is Quora still a thing? I thought it was largely made
obsolete by the various StackExchange sites and networks.

~~~
mks40
You are not wrong. Of course, this is personal perspective, but in 2014-15
there was still a fairly academic tone to many questions, as in, you could ask
actual science and math questions and get a knowledgable academic to answer
them.

Today, if I open my feed, most of it is questions on personal experiences
(from just now): 'What is the craziest thing you ever did when you were a
teenager?', 'What surprised you most about attending graduate school in the
US?, 'What is the most brutal death?'. I never specified interest in any of
these topics.

What is worse to me is that I do not see any way to disable topics quickly so
I have to perpetually mute high-impact posters who have attracted a large
enough audience to be asked about their personal lives and seemingly enjoy
answering the same things about themselves over and over. Like any web forum,
the majority of replies comes from a relatively small amount of posters who
keep retelling their personal story about their admission to MIT/their high
IQ.

I suppose Quora is paying the price of growth and I realise my interests are
not aligned with Quora's in attracting a large audience. It just means I am
not personally interested in writing any content for it any more and I think
many early users feel the same.

~~~
GoodbyeEarl
That's exactly the reason why I left Quora. It used to be such an amazing
place to read interesting stuff now it's only about meaningful questions.

~~~
mks40
Upon further consideration, I suspect this was a very intentional move and not
just a growth effect, because they could just as well have kept moderation
strict.

People do like to answer questions and be acknowledged for their know-how, but
what people love is to talk about themselves and have their experiences
validated.

Sure, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook give a way to have your social existence
acknowledged, but Quora offers anyone to have their individual life
experiences validated, no matter if they have the lifestyle or looks typically
associated with social media fame. That is a very powerful attractor but
unfortunately brings out the result described above - users beginning to talk
incessantly about themselves as a topic, the more one answers, the more one
has the chance to convert to a topic oneself and have even more explicit
opportunity to tell one's story.

Combine this with low traffic in topics of maybe more serious interest and
Quora will suggest any popular content ('topics you might like). This is how
one ends up having these stories in your feed without ever expressing interest
in them.

------
csa
Academia.edu have the right idea, but their execution sucks.

\- Signing up is an exercise is spam. Most of the people who are willing to
endure the whole thing are the least desirable customers (i.e., folks with
more style than substance).

\- Their onboarding process sucks. Most popular researchers will not jump
through the hoops necessary to get their stuff on board. There is no
compelling reason to be on there at this point. Within the first 30-60 secs,
there is no "hell yeah!" moment.

\- The issues of what constitutes "previously published" for elite journals is
potentially probelmatic (although it shouldn't be in this case).

\- The obvious gift of a research "family tree" has not been offered. Being
able to identify distant relatives on this tree has ridiculously high value
that has not been manifested.

\- The recommendation engine sucks. For someone writing a paper on a certain
topic, a.e should be able to crank out a fairly accurate list of papers you
will want to read or cite before you write. This would be very high value add
if done well. A.e whiffed on this one, too.

There is a huge need for what a.e is offering or could offer, but their
execution has been pretty terrible. It seems like they are optimizing metrics
for their funders rather than their customers.

If that site does die, I will gladly take it off of their hands, give them 10%
equity to leave, and turn it into a ubiquitous resource for academics and
researchers.

They really need to stop drinking the Bay Area kool aid and figure out what
their core customers want... and then deliver that.

------
merraksh
How to reproduce:

1) log in 2) search your favorite author 3) verify there are zero results in
normal search and n>0 in advanced search (as the normal search is on paper
titles only) 4) proceed to advanced search, find monthly subscription offer.

It doesn't feel too good having uploaded some of my articles there, and I hope
other similar services (ResearchGate) won't do the same.

------
amelius
Perhaps public internet services should really be created in, well, academia
and government organizations, like in the old days (think email). At least
then we'll see some federation, openness of data where useful, and as a bonus,
everything will be devoid of ads and user-tracking.

~~~
hedora
I'd take it a step further. After the dot com crash, craigslist basically
destroyed the entire classified ad industry by being free and good enough.

I want that for social (without ads/tracking/vc money/invasive monetization,
and with strong privacy, author's rights and archival properties).

The cost per user of operating these social network sites must be plummeting
with hardware costs. Clearly diaspora didn't quite get the formula right. Soon
someone will, I hope.

~~~
earthboundkid
I agree that this is a good goal, but Craigslist had some unusual advantages
against classifieds: they undercut the cost and were national; newspapers were
in denial about the internet, lacked technical knowhow, and fragmented into
many local markets. I think if you made a good, free Facebook killer, Facebook
wouldn't just let itself be taken by surprise to the same degree.

------
lottin
While I fully agree that the academic journal industry is a money extraction
racket that needs to be put out of business, I don't see how academia.edu was
contributing towards that end. The simple solution is for governments to
require that the research that they fund be published under a free license of
some sort.

~~~
jdavis703
Can we start this at the ballot iniative level? I imagine that if the change
was worded like "An inatiative​ that requires free, public access to all
government funded research" would be a relatively non-partisan issue.

~~~
wavefunction
>a relatively non-partisan issue.

Were it were so. I think you'll find some rather strenuous objections to your
moderate proposal, though that's not so much partisanship as a very loud
minority of a minority of the population stridently pursuing their ideology.

~~~
jdavis703
What "strenous" arguments would occur against this?

~~~
jhbadger
The for-profit publishing industry (and politicians they donate to) have
argued time and again that their business model needs to be defended in order
for science to function and that things like open repositories are bad. The
(defeated) 2012 Research Works Act would have essentially destroyed the
largest repository PubMed Central by eliminating the open access provisions of
the NIH Public Access Policy.

------
AdamSC1
Considering how much institutes pay for journal licenses or the $20 - $50 I
pay for a single article, I don't have much of an issue with $8 a month to
find the right article.

Not to mention, you can still find articles for free if the keyword is in the
title or keyword abstract so the $8 a month isn't necessary.

That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a rev-share model (like old platforms like
Squidoo) for popular article authors who are sharing their work for free. With
a growing amount of works coming from poorly paid adjuncts, while journals,
publishers and institutions continue to rake in huge money, it'd be good to
see some of this flowing back to the researchers who work to support the open
access of knowledge.

~~~
CJefferson
But, you still have to pay to buy the article, and usually you can find the
article with Google -- so basically I find you are paying for an inferior
google.

~~~
Anderkent
Surely if you can find the article on google, you don't need their advanced
content search; you know the title and can use the simple search

------
sunir
The author should ask his librarian how much the school pays for access to
journals, preferably while seated and not eating anything lest he choke.

~~~
tom_mellior
But academia.edu does not replace the broken system of those journals, it just
adds an additional broken layer at an extra cost.

Oh well. I logged in, verified that it shows the same broken behavior, then
deleted my account. I wasn't really using it anyway. There are both better
search engines and better ways of self-hosting my publications.

------
mankash666
Google scholar solves the same problem, for free.

HTTPS://Scholar.Google.com

------
XenophileJKO
If I go to google now and type in "site:academia.edu Potterheads" I get the 26
papers alluded to in the linked article.

------
PaulHoule
I think 8 euro a month is not a huge price to pay.

Open access systems have a hard time getting ongoing funding; arxiv did not
have the beginning of a sustainable plan before it was 20 yrs old, and it had
near death experiences in the meantime.

~~~
a3_nm
> I think 8 euro a month is not a huge price to pay.

It's a price that readers (people who wish to access scientific articles) have
to pay: this is unacceptable no matter the amount.

> [arXiv] had near death experiences in the meantime

I have never heard about this before, do you have any specific reference?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The problem is that starting free, promising the world, locking "customers"
into your ecosystems, and then forcing them to pay for a service you used to
provide for free is bad.

It's really, really bad. Potentially suicidally bad.

In this case the nominal price is reasonable - but the cost in lost trust and
goodwill certainly isn't, and may turn out to be more than a.e can afford to
pay.

------
twoslide
The general point is a good one. However, the specific issue the author raises
(paid advanced search) is easily avoided with google's "site" operator, e.g.
"potterheads site:academia.edu"

------
neumann
I refuse to sign up to Academia and ResearchGate, for-profit companies that
are littering indexes with pay-wall accessible PDFs that should be available
through institutional login, or the author's website. And now, through sci-
hub.

Google scholar paired with sci-hub has become the fastest way to access papers
given that institutional subscriptions are scatter gun.

1\. Find paper on scholar.google.com 2\. Find PDF or pay-wall 3\. Click the
sci-hub bookmarklet

If I want to discover papers from my field, I talk to my colleagues. Another
wall-garden I do not need.

------
kayhi
Looks like the startup is trying different approaches to increase their
revenue.

Paid monthly subscription and analytics charges to the end user. I guess the
author thinks it is the end of the platform, which is possible. I'm just
hesitate to immediately conclude the business is done because of this choice.
If the paid upgrades don't provide enough value the people won't sign up and
maybe they will focus on another way. Research Gate is very similar site that
sells ad space and for job postings so maybe they will head in that direction.

------
tomcam
How does a commercial enterprise even get a .EDU domain? I tried to obtain one
for the local private high school, and was told it's available only to
institutes of higher learning.

------
SubiculumCode
Ihave both Academia.edu and Researchgate accounts. For themost part, everyone
I know uses it as a kind of cv and repository for preprints of articles
published in the usual suspect journals, and not as a replacement for
journals.

------
hprotagonist
academia.edu always smelled weird to me. I guess i was right!

