Academia.edu - Share research
academia.edu
academia.edu
- 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.
- 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, and in real-time.
- 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 a lot 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 the 2.5 billion people who are online right now, magical things may happen.
Critical to achieving change in science is understanding how the reputation system works. Competition for funding is intense, and scientists optimize for the kinds of reputation metrics that the funding bodies and hiring committees check for. To achieve instant distribution, better peer review, multi-media sharing, and open sharing, one has to build reputation metrics that encourage that kind of activity.
Historically the main reputation metric in science has been the journal title. But over the last 4-5 years, new reputation metrics have emerged in science. Google Scholar pioneered the citation count: it released the count of how many inbound citations your work has received, and scientists started to take that metric and say to their funding committees 'this metric reflects well on me; I would like you to take it into account when evaluating my work'.
Academia.edu has been pioneering the introduction of usage metrics: page view counts for your papers. Our users regularly take screenshots of their Analytics Dashboard on Academia.edu and submit them to their tenure committees and funding bodies. There is a good case of someone including their Academia.edu Analytics in their application for tenure here http://blog.academia.edu/post/23302130233/user-spotlight-tim....
In the future there will be a family of reputation metrics in science, each reflecting a different aspect of impact.
If you are excited about building this future of science, we are looking for passionate people to join us. More about the company is here http://academia.edu/hiring. Send me an email at richard[at]academia.edu if you would like to chat further.
We are working tirelessly on achieving this mission, and appreciate the interest and the feedback.
I think we all really appreciate the values of openness and ease of access. But I have two questions along those lines. The first is why, as people asked below, must one be a registered member to download a paper? The second is why the terms of use contain this:
> Fees. You acknowledge that Academia.edu reserves the right to charge for the Academia.edu Services and to change its fees from time to time in its discretion. If Academia.edu terminates your Membership because you have breached the Agreement, you shall not be entitled to the refund of any unused portion of subscription fees.
Do you anticipate charging for Academia.edu in the future?
That said it would be unwise at this stage to rule out some kind of freemium option. It is not the ideal option, but when trying to achieve a mission you want to keep as many options open as possible. You don't want to box yourself in in ways that may damage you later. There are also many good freemium services (Github, Dropbox, LinkedIn).
To achieve a revolution in science, you need to build a huge community, and change the behavior of scientists. There are many ways in which a site tries to grow. Requiring users to sign up to download papers is one of those growth channels for us. If it was a big deal amongst our users, we would change it. But in practice it hasn't been an issue; our users don't mind this. Most people read the HTML5 version that is displayed in the browser. If they have to register to get a local copy of the paper, instead of paying $35 to get it from a journal, they don't mind that. Over 2 million academics have signed up, and we have about 4.5 million monthly unique visitors, so we have a fair amount of data on this.
1.) It seems to be much harder to discover papers, in particular abstracts, than on, say, arxiv.org or even Google Scholar.
2.) They seem to encourage the posting of papers to their site. Publishers usually at least accept researchers posting papers to their own homepages and to the ArXiv, as it is obvious that this is non-commercial and solely to further the spread of scienctific knowledge. But Academia.edu seem to be a commercial venture, so it is quite possibly that publishers will not accept having papers posted there.
3.) It seems it takes a lot of Javascript to even display a paper, and then they only appear as images, without any download option.
The arXiv is my favorite of the preprint repositories, but focuses mainly on scientific areas. For the social sciences, law, humanities, etc., SSRN (http://www.ssrn.com/) is a decent alternative. Some people are wary of it because it's for-profit (like academia.edu), and it also has a bunch of pointless cruft (such as a completely useless categorization system and proliferation of "top-10" lists), but it does at least allow you to download the PDFs. It's really improved access to legal scholarship especially; like with physics/arXiv, law/SSRN is now a pairing that's widely known in the field and it's basically expected you'll upload your preprint there if you want to be read.
http://www.academia.edu/1741963/Formal_Specification_and_Doc...
You do have to be registered to download, but it's better than paying $20.
Consider that the people that put their stuff their would ordinarily perhaps have put it on their personal homepage or some e-print service, so comparing it to the $20 fee of publishers is not the right comparison.
With regard to your other point, we think that the conversion of the PDF to HTML 5 and a couple of other things we do on Academia.edu massively increases the visibility of your paper as compared to hosting it on a department webpage.
This is a huge benefit for the individual researcher in increasing the impact of their work and the number of people who find and use it.
http://philpapers.org/ is good for philosophy.
1) The advantage over the personal homepage is that more people will see it. Would a video get more views on your blog or on a video sharing site with lots of content where people went to find content like that? 2) I think the idea is that instead of using the current journal system, where professors try to show how their work has an impact for their university by paying to put it behind a paywall is just broken. Ideally professors will post straight to Academia and bypass publishers altogether. if you want people to read your work, putting it in an open, free forum where more people will see it AND you can track the metrics of your work seems far preferable to paying to put your work behind a paywall if you go the traditional route. I think they seem to acknowledge that publishers won't be pleased if you post your already published work on Academia. 3) The answer to the final thing seems to just be that it is a really tough technical challenge. They seem to be a fairly small team and the facebook motto that "the journey is 1% finished" seems to apply here. Imagine the possibilities if this takes off. We currently think of journals as paper with ink on the pages, but a site where all academics can share their work, and we see new ways of sharing research, like executable code, rich media, etc, could really improve academia and science in general IMO.
This might work in fields where there is more collaboration than competition, such as most of physics, but it won't work in the biomedical sciences. People want and need to publish in high impact, well-established journals. That's just the reality for now.
In the world of Google Scholar, this isn't true. Google Scholar indexes scientific papers and aggregates PDF links, without regard for what website the PDFs came from. If no one cites your paper and it's not in a journal I follow, I probably won't read it anyway. If I am sufficiently interested, when I search Google Scholar, the PDF link on your personal website will be as accessible as a PDF link anywhere else. (It may even be more accessible. If, as others have suggested, Academia.edu doesn't let you download PDFs without registration, then PDFs uploaded to Academia.edu probably don't get indexed by Google Scholar.)
$ wget -O file.pdf http://www.academia.edu/attachments/27796552/download_file
--2013-01-13 12:55:35-- http://www.academia.edu/attachments/27796552/download_file
Resolving www.academia.edu... 50.16.203.88
Connecting to www.academia.edu|50.16.203.88|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://www.academia.edu/login?cp=/attachments/27796552/download_file&cs= [following]
--2013-01-13 12:55:35-- http://www.academia.edu/login?cp=/attachments/27796552/download_file&cs=
Reusing existing connection to www.academia.edu:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://academia.edu/login?cp=/attachments/27796552/download_file&cs=&tcw=1 [following]
--2013-01-13 12:55:36-- http://academia.edu/login?cp=/attachments/27796552/download_file&cs=&tcw=1
Resolving academia.edu... 50.16.203.88
Reusing existing connection to www.academia.edu:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 302 Found
Location: http://www.academia.edu/cookies_required [following]
--2013-01-13 12:55:36-- http://www.academia.edu/cookies_required
Reusing existing connection to www.academia.edu:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: unspecified [text/html]
Saving to: “file.pdf”
[ <=> ] 27,784 --.-K/s in 0.1s
2013-01-13 12:55:36 (284 KB/s) - “file.pdf” saved [27784]Why?
Sure, at a personal level, it might be slightly annoying to you to have to create an Academia.edu account. But Academia's entire value is in the users, content, and community which have built up around it. If viral hooks like "signup to download" substantially grow the Academia community (and I believe this one does), then the value which they will create for you in having an accessible library of the world's research will far offset the small annoyance of having to sign up.
Don't put yourself before the content, that's the same mistake everybody else is making in this space.
Another thing I noticed is that most of my professors and colleagues seem to have active ResearchGate profiles. Academia.edu is still pretty new, so I only found a few friends that had Academia.edu accounts.
It will be interesting to see where this all goes. I will personally be using both sites, but I better get back to finishing my first publication :)
I'm not logged in and just searched. Is this what you mean or are you talking about something else?