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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.

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