The Story Behind a Radical New Idea: A Social Network for Academia | Hacker News Reader

The Story Behind a Radical New Idea: A Social Network for Academia

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41 pointsRichardPrice34 comments

Sorry to say that I almost fell off my chair to see a claim that a social network for academia is a radical new idea. This is an old established idea that has been with us for over 150 years. Academia is one of the most successful social networks ever. Sure, there are changes in how it functions but I wouldn't call that radical. Academics were the early adopters of the Internet, creating thousands of mailing lists before the web came along.

I read lots of academic papers and I find them in two ways. One, is that I google for them. And the second is by following up references in papers to find a particular author's web page where they usually have lots of info about their work including a complete list of papers that they have published. Often these are very old school web pages that were started circa 1992 or so. The WWW only went public in 1990.

Ever since academia moved onto the Internet in around 1990, they have been innovating with bibliographic servers that go far beyond a web search engine. It is nice to see some more incremental improvements but the hype about it being radical and new does more harm than help.

I can't see how this is a "radical new idea". It's a good idea and very valuable if executed correctly, but taking an existing, proved model (aka facebook) and tweaking it to work for academics is not new and hardly radical. I'm not hating on the idea, I love more tools for academia, but the title is hyperbole.

It's probably not a new idea. Neither was Facebook. 99% perspiration and all that.

Personally, I wish him well. I think academic journals are a very worthy target of disruption.

i thought the same thing at first, having just read the title, but it seems it's really not about the "social network" part at all. this is more like arXiv.org in that it's a platform for academics to publish their own research papers.

Have you tried actually logging in? This is not quite arxiv.org — I'd estimate that 90% of the engineering going into academia.edu has gone towards features on par with LinkedIn for their spamminess. I signed up, and was asked about 10 times to connect to Facebook, Gmail, invite my friends, etc.

They have some interesting features (such as feeds of recent articles organized by journal you can sign up for), but by far the most important feature of academia.edu is growing academia.edu.

Not publish: share and discover. That's how we network.

Having said that, I haven't found Academia.edu useful. I like Google Scholar better, and that has plenty of problems.

This is the first I have seen of academia.edu. Everyone I know are on researchgate.net. First comment was about orcid.org, another site I just found out about. Talk about market saturation and social network fragmentation!

Very, very fragmented. I'm building something that is in some ways competing with Academia.edu, and I didn't even discover them until I was deep into the market research. But maybe I'm just a crappy researcher :)

In 2010 I worked for http://philpapers.org/ - this one is limited to philosophy.

  It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide

Looks like they're hitting critical mass. I love the idea that this is liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers that our taxes are paying for.

I'm also delighted that Khosla Ventures are giving this room to breathe. "Khosla does appear to be increasingly open to investing in startups that have a social mission and a business model. This is often referred to as 'impact investing'"

> liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers

Annoyingly, you have to register an account and log in to download any papers. The uploader doesn't have any control over this. It's still free, but distinctly worse than arXiv, or heck, even the classic academic homepage with PDFs on it, both of which already exist.

I would guess this also inflates their membership count, which is, I assume, the reason for the requirement. I myself never use academia.edu when I can help it, but I have an account because I must sometimes log in when someone has chosen to host their paper there instead of somewhere better.

Although not primarily in the discovery space, if you're a user of arXiv, you may be interested in the n-gram viewer our lab made: http://arxiv.culturomics.org

The stat is unclear. I'm a member of the website, but I'm a college student. A Google search shows that there's about 20 million college students in the US alone.

I agree that the platform is growing quickly and I wish them the best, but I don't think they have 25% of the world's academics right now.

Every published paper (the Version of Record) gets a DOI. Most for-profit publishers paywall access to these. In order to 'do academia' you must cite using the DOI, which points only to the Version of Record.

It's great to see papers published in the open (I assume this is the Personal Version of papers), but in order to participate in the academic process, you have to cite the Version of Record.

As I understand it (I'm new to the industry) publishers are starting to realise that if they don't provide free access to government funded papers then their revenue streams will dry up.

> It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide

That statistic looks spurious to me. Around 20% of my academia.edu contacts are 'independent researchers'. I'm not a heavy user of the site, and I pay little attention to it.

I can tell you from experience that getting buy in from mid to senior academics for this kind of thing is really tough as it doesn't add value to what they do in pre-existing ways already. The current bureaucratic cost cutting environment in universities doesn't help either.

I created an account a while back to circumvent Academia.edu's signup wall, not using my full name because I don't actually want an academia.edu page coming up when someone Googles me. I don't think I meant to "follow" Jean-Francois Delvenne of the University of Leeds, but unfortunately for Prof. Delvenne I did and now "this is a nice website for me to poop on" is one of his 37 followers (http://leeds.academia.edu/JeanFrancoisDelvenne/Followers?_pj...). And I'm not even sure this is the only account I made for this purpose.

The real question is, how many active weekly users does Academia.edu have?

Subject to your compliance with the terms and conditions of these Terms, Academia.edu authorizes you to download, view and print any Academia.edu Content, solely for your personal and non-commercial purposes, and to access and use the Site and Services, including to download, view and print any Member Content solely for your personal and non-commercial purposes, and subject to the restrictions set forth in these Terms. You have no right to sublicense the license rights granted in this section.

Let freedom ring!

I don't know whether it's Rao's write-up or not but this sounds like absolute rubbish written by yet another "business management" "consultant".

Is Hacker News about hacking or about lame web-2.0 bubble business bullshit?

About 20% hacking, 80% bbb. But I find so many gems in that 20% it's still one of the best single sources on the net for hacking.

Worth mentioning Orcid.org. Solves broadly the same problem. No need to get profit involved.

One of the problems with for-profit is that the company is likely to sell its community out if they think that'll make them more money. See: Elsevier buying Mendeley and the backlash from that: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/201...

This Onion talk put it really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_...

@smokinn thank you for the great video! I didn't know that the onion had such quality talks. I personally use Mendeley, but only to obtain other people's Papers and sync my Bibtex fies.

@afandian NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia.

Generally speaking, I really don't get what's good about those platforms. Can anyone try to explain why people keep using it for another thing than peer-pressure?? I mean you upload a damn pdf with some meta-data attached to it. What's so hard? Use XMPP/IRC or Usenet for the communication and you're set, I must be dumb. I don't see why there is a need for those "new social networks". When email/mailing-lists/irc/xmpp/usenet/forums etc. already exist.

A large chunk of ORCID actually is open source: https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source (though I don't necessarily agree that it should be, since ORCID is not a library or tool, but rather a service that only has real value if there's a single instance in existence).

I think there's a misunderstanding here on what ORCID is exactly. The name is an acronym for "Open Researcher and Contributor ID." It has nothing to do with publishing, but rather is being built as a central arbiter of academic identity.

Academics love to measure their importance by the papers they've authored or co-authored. Most databases currently track the names of authors associated with each published paper. But names are frustratingly ambiguous or degenerate, which makes it difficult to do things like create an auto-updated list of all the papers you've published.

ORCID is a publisher-funded non profit designed to reduce ambiguity in author identification, by simply assigning a UUID to every researcher. This is a case of publishers agreeing that collaboratively funding a single, centralized technical solution will benefit everyone much more than having a bunch of competing, siloed systems.

Sorry I didn't understand your comment "NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia". Could you clarify?

Not worth it for academia means, that academia deserves something better than a vendor lock-in, by some closed-source software. It deserves a medium that doesn't stand in it's way, but empowers students/professors, scientists and other people, instead of depowering them by centralizing all power to one login provider.

Academia is about innovation and sharing knowledge. A gatekeeper or a closed-source platform inevitably creates a bottleneck that slows innovation and knowledge sharing down. Furthermore, a social network as Academia requires a medium that adapts to it's need, not the other way around, therefore an optimal solution can only be opensource.

ORCID is sneaky in the way it's integrating itself into existing publisher workflows so seamlessly. All the vendors up and down the traditional academic publishing food chain seem to be racing to support it.

ORCID is non-profit. There are some organisations, such as ORCID, who exist for the purpose of facilitating the academic publishing 'industry' rather than making money out of it.

Sometimes a businessperson spots an opportunity and exploits it. Sometimes people who all have a common problem get together and try to solve it.

Uh, yes. Maybe I should clarify my own point.

I suspect we're going to see ORCID explode in usage and popularity over the next few years. And I don't think that's going to be driven by authors, at first. It's going to be driven by the publishers. This is going to be possible because of how well ORCID integrates with the current world of online academic publishing.

So imagine in a year or two, a journal like Nature hypothetically says, "We have this cool feature now called ORCID, and all authors submitting manuscripts MUST provide an ORCID ID. You'll love it, we swear." Then the same authors try to get another paper published, maybe in an Elsevier journal, and suddenly they're all screaming, "WTF I have this sweet ORCID ID, why can't your platform support ORCID?" Now the editors of that journal are going to remember ORCID and take it into consideration when they re-up their contracts with Elsevier (or jump ship). So of course Elsevier needs to support ORCID. Then more journals adopt it. And around the circle we go.

Those seeds are already being planted, and are going to drive up ORCID usage in a very organic and unassuming way. That's why I say it's sneaky. Not because they have a profit incentive, but because of the indirect means by which I think they're going to grow. It's a very different approach from academia.edu even though they're in the same general domain.

Sure, I think that's what will happen. But I don't think there's any other way of doing it.

ORCID is solving the problem of identifying and crediting individual academics, not necessarily because the academics are frustrated (as, I think, is the motivation behind academia.edu) but for practical metadata reasons.

For sure lots of publishers are going to start saying 'do you have an ORCID?' and vice versa. I think the alternative is lots of publishers each saying 'could you log in to our custom identity service'. Around the circle we go, as you say. But what's wrong with that? It's all in the open, it's all documented, it's all (as far as I can tell) open source. And it's OAuth2 FWIW.

For the record, here's the list of members:

http://orcid.org/about/community/members

and sponsors:

http://orcid.org/about/community/sponsors

This places some of our greatest resources into a closed box not available to the general public.

How does one obtain a .edu domain name?

Either you have to be a legitimate academic institution, or you aren't, but are grandfathered in because you acquired the domain before 2001. This case is #2.

I thought that was how facebook started

April fool?

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