Academia.edu Raises $1.6 Million | Hacker News Reader

Academia.edu Raises $1.6 Million

techcrunch.com

30 pointscrescendo13 comments

This could be very helpful, so long as academics maintain their profiles. I currently use an ad-hoc system of Google Reader's "check if webpage changed" functionality to check for new papers in my fields of interest. For economics, these are listed on pages like:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=M13

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?code=G24

which gives an ugly summary of updates to non-RSS friendly websites. Academia.edu appears to require that

1. Authors sign up

2. Authors also update their profiles with their new research

My experience suggests this will be difficult for econ: I repeated the Google readers process for the active authors in my field. Google tracks their "Working Papers" pages for updates and lets me know when they add a paper (or change a font!) For the two dozen authors I track, only one has updated their page in the last two months.

I'm not sure about field-wide RSS feeds, but SSRN does have author-specific RSS feeds like http://www.ssrn.com/rss/authors/1997/0701/998.rss for Eugene Fama.

And we're hiring: http://www.academia.edu/jobs

We're based in downtown SF and we're looking for engineers to help us build a great product for researchers.

They have Hawking, Dawkins, Chomsky, Krugman on board already as scientists. Wow.

I'm pretty sure that list sums to zero, though.

I just signed up, and the web site is remarkably slick. Anybody who's made web apps knows how hard it is to make something that just does what it's supposed to as well as this. I especially like the easy integration with GMail, Facebook, and so on.

The signup process is a bit long, but I'm not sure if that's a bad thing.

Edit: When I selected "Electrical & Computer Engineering" from the drop-down menu of departments, the ampersand got turned into "&". I'm pretty sure this is a bug.

I disagree. I found the interface clunky and the research interest categories were really sloppy (typos, duplicates, inconsistent granularities, etc...). Also, the inability to click on section names during sign up was very frustrating.

There is an alternative venture http://www.ulurn.com. Not as successful though...

Excuse my ignorance, but how did they get a .edu?

my guess is that they purchased a grandfathered in .edu .

It was almost certainly registered before they tightened the restrictions on registration, and the current owners bought it from them.

One of our subsidaries registered it before 2001, when there were no restrictions.

How did they manage to get the domain name? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.edu:

Starting on October 29, 2001, only post-secondary institutions and organizations that are accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education's list of nationally recognized accrediting agencies are eligible to apply for a edu domain.

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