Academia.edu Overhauls Profiles As Researchers Grow Their Personal Brands

- Instant distribution. Right now there is a 12 month time-lag between submitting a paper to a journal, and the paper being published. We need to remove that time-lag and introduce instant distribution of scientific ideas.

- Multi-media. Right now, scientists only share papers in PDF form. We need to bring about a science where scientists are incentivized to share data-sets, code, videos, blog posts, and comments on all these media. Right now 50% or more of the world’s scientific output does not get shared, because the system of credibility metrics only rewards one kind of format, the paper. We need to change this.

- Open access. We need to bring about a world where a villager in India has the same access to the world’s scientific output as a professor in Harvard. When you open up access to the world’s scientific literature to 2 billion people, magical things may happen.

- Better peer review. Right now the peer review process takes 12 months to complete, and only surfaces the opinions of two academics - academics who may be biased, uninformed about the subject area, or just in a bad mood when writing the review. 2 people is too small a sample size. We need a faster and more robust peer review system, one that surfaces the opinions of the entire scientific community, across a variety of dimensions, and in real-time.

There are a couple of themes that connect these four goals. One theme is that increasingly scientists are wanting to have a direct relationship with their audience, as well as analytics that reflect how that relationship is developing. Previously the scientific journal would mediate the relationship between the scientist and his/her audience. This is starting to change, and it's reflective of broader changes on the web, as sites like Twitter and Facebook allow people to have more direct, unmediated, connections with their audience.

The second theme that connects these points is credibility metrics. The behavior of scientists is driven by the need to build credibility metrics, ones that reflect well on the scientist and his/her work when they are applying for a grant or a job. New reputation and credibility metrics are starting to emerge in science that incentivize things like instant distribution, or the sharing of data-sets, or open access sharing. I think the emergence of these new credibility metrics (citation counts from Google Scholar, usage metrics such as download counts from Academia.edu) are going to have a big impact on the rate at which science evolves.

It's an exciting time for science. Science is transitioning from a 17th century way of sharing ideas (sending papers around the world with 12 month time-lags in every iteration) to a much faster system of sharing ideas on the web.

If this mission sounds exciting to you, I would love to hear from you at richard [at] academia.edu. We are looking to hire engineers to join our team, and more generally I love chatting to people who are excited about trying to make science faster, and more open.