Academia.edu raises $4.5 million to help academics share research papers

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.

'"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.'

Indeed when I worked for http://philpapers.org this was quoted by users as the main reason to use it.

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.

> Domain record activated: 10-May-1999

I believe this domain was registered before Educause adopted the accreditation requirement. See the grandfathering policy on http://net.educause.edu/edudomain/eligibility.asp .

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

.edu domain names registered prior to 2001 were grandfathered in and not made subject to the requirements of being a higher educational institution. This is the case with www.academia.edu.

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.