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Comment by anonymouz | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see the advantage of this over personal homepages and/or the ArXiv. Three problems that seem to come up immediately:

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.

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Yes, I could deal with the rest of them, but #3 really reduces its usefulness. It's still better to find a publicly accessible paper on academia.edu than nowhere, but having to page through it online and not being able to download a PDF is not good, especially when the authors in most cases didn't intend that restriction.

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.

I see a download link, bright green, upper left. E.g:

http://www.academia.edu/1741963/Formal_Specification_and_Doc...

You do have to be registered to download, but it's better than paying $20.

I don't get the link, so yes, apparently one has to register. Personally I find that quite horrible. There are serious efforts underway to open up research, and putting stuff into yet another walled-garden (or rather, dozens of different walled-gardens) is a step backward.

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.

The download option is shown to logged out users too, so you should see it. But you do have to be registered in order to compete the download.

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.

Agreed. It isn't much good saying 'arXiv is good enough' when it only covers scientific areas.

http://philpapers.org/ is good for philosophy.

Wow, academia.edu only shows images of pages of pdfs, instead of giving you the actual pdf? I didn't know that. That's absolutely unacceptable .. if true- and a later comment shows that this is only half-true. So it's not as completely ridiculous as I thought, but this wasn't an over-reaction anyway. Companies tend to do terrible things to pdfs.

No, that is incorrect. If the user has uploaded a copy of the PDF, we both show it on the page as an HTML 5 conversion and offer the PDF file as a download.

I see that you have a download link, but it doesn't work.

    $ 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]

The HTML 5 conversion is shown to all visitors, but you have to be a registered user to download the file. You're being redirected to a login page here.

> you have to be a registered user to download the file.

Why?

To help Academia.edu grow, of course. Think about it this way:

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.

You help Academia grow by increasing the userbase, forcing users to log in puts up a barrier where none is needed. People come to academia.edu (to which I'm sympathetic, I submitted the link) for the papers, not to make an account.

Don't put yourself before the content, that's the same mistake everybody else is making in this space.

Just a few responses as I've been using the site for awhile:

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.

But with other more established networks such as researchgate or mendeley, is this really good for science overall? more segregation. It does not seem to offer anything more than the two afore mentioned options. Really do not know what to do on it, while mendeley offers a great way to organize papers and researchgate is a great place to get advice as well as share your work.

> I think the idea is that instead of using the current journal system...professors will post straight to Academia and bypass publishers altogether

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.

> 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?

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.)

Papers uploaded to Academia definitely do get indexed by Google. And we show the full text of the paper inline on the page too, so the text is right there after a user clicks through from the search result.

Yes, I just checked this. They get indexed by Google, but as HTML. There is no PDF link because it's behind a registration-wall, which is still a good reason to put the PDF on your personal homepage or arXiv instead.

Just want to point out that #3 is incorrect. Where users have uploaded PDFs to their profile, we show the full text of the paper as an HTML 5 conversion to all visitors, and offer the PDF as a download to registered users.

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