Academia.edu Launches A Directory Of 12,500 Academic Journals

So far, without having used either one extensively, I'm finding Mendeley's "related papers" approach, which seems to be based on a mixture of the social graph and NLP, a bit more useful.

At least in my area, journals aren't things you "browse" anymore, because the big journals have very disparate sub-fields represented in them, most of which I don't regularly keep up on. They're closer to repositories where papers get filed away. The sub-field I care about publishes regularly in 5-6 journals/conferences, and somewhat less regularly in another 15-20 or so, so what I really want is the non-existent Journal of the Stuff I Research, whose centroid is my own research. In reality, that journal is scattered across a bunch of other publications, but Mendeley makes some effort to reconstruct it for me.

Just following something super-broad like Science or Artificial Intelligence, though, isn't as useful to me, because the vast majority of papers just aren't going to be relevant to my research.

In today's age,where Google news aggregates and clusters similar news, and where blog articles with dubious content, but strong twitter-networks, can virally disseminate information, for how long can research publications take a maintain a -40-USD-per-paper approach? I ,for one, am totally for academia.edu breaks this barrier down in the future.Curious as to what other HN'ers feel.

I think efforts like these are patches for a soon-to-be obsolete system.

Science publishing needs to look less like Gutenberg and more like Quora - way faster turnaround and less susceptible to corruption amongst overly powerful editorial committees.

Social graph APIs have solved the identity & attribution problems that prevented blogs from filling this niche (no tenure committee cares about your blog's pageviews because they are hard to assess), so we should be seeing meaningful competition soon.

I'm working on an open-source project in this space with a focus on medicine - contact me if you're interested!

Publication lags -- sometimes 3-4 years in economics/finance -- make the news feed they built less useful. If instead they built the feed around http://ssrn.com or http://ideas.repec.org, it could have value for fields where publication occurs after a paper has its impact.

Seeing sites that aim to serve the research community (pubget comes also to mind) begin to pop up is very exciting. that said, I think the social graph component is useful as a way to inform what papers the site shows you, but should not be explicitly implemented in this Facebook-ish way. Seriously, I do not want to friend my PI.

Yeah, this seems like a necessary building block for an academic social network, but an index of journals isn't very exciting by itself. I already have RSS subscriptions to the journals that have high impact in my field and I won't be looking for new journals with this "browse" feature.

By the way, in the area of philosophy we ( http://philpapers.org/ ) cover much more ground - with crawling not only journal sites, but also personal web pages of researchers, books etc. We have also some automatic classification tool (into a very detailed taxonomy system: http://philpapers.org/categories.pl), discussion forums, tools for monitoring research (like following your favourite researchers, or articles published by your Facebook friends) and other cool stuff - and the system is Open Source: https://github.com/xPapers/xPapers (this is still a very early release).