Academia.edu - Share research(academia.edu)
academia.edu
Academia.edu - Share research
http://academia.edu/
40 comments
Thanks for your hard work!
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?
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?
We plan to monetize via charging R&D firms for access to 'trending research' data - data about which papers are trending in a given area of research. I am a firm believer that the participants in the scientific community, and the world in general, should not pay to share or access research. Participants on Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, and other sites don't pay to share ideas, and the same should be true of the way science works.
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.
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.
I attempted to sign up today and found out that you have to be a member of a research institution. Why is this? Doesn't this defeat much of the purpose of openness (as members of research institutions usually already have access to paywall-protected research anyway, whereas the general public doesn't)?
You don't have to be a member of a research institution. On the signup page, there is a checkbox to sign up as an independent researcher. See this screenshot http://cl.ly/image/1k2L0u1J1D3L
OK, I apologize then. That is a different screen from the one I found to sign up at, but I see that my screen also has a checkbox at the bottom.
Thanks for the response!
This seems in rather poor taste.
Many people are discussing the future of research sharing right now. As one of the largest platforms on the web for sharing research, and since someone submitted this link (not me), it seems appropriate to give our view on how we think about the future of science.
We are working tirelessly on achieving this mission, and appreciate the interest and the feedback.
We are working tirelessly on achieving this mission, and appreciate the interest and the feedback.
Who sponsors this? What does it do?
It's a social network for researchers. It's not sponsored by anyone; it's a for-profit company. They managed to get an .edu address because the TLD wasn't restricted until 2001, and pre-2001 registrations are grandfathered in.
Guess it is something like http://www.researchgate.net ?
ResearchGate is very nice, but you have to request and wait for the full-text of a publication from the author. In Academia.edu, you just get a direct link to a full-text source or a straight up PDF download. At least that is how my experience has been so far.
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 :)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I think it should provide a mean for searching/browsing papers without login in.
http://cl.ly/image/3t1D2Q1f1j1O
I'm not logged in and just searched. Is this what you mean or are you talking about something else?
I'm not logged in and just searched. Is this what you mean or are you talking about something else?
I'm (very) annoyed that I had to link the account to Facebook. I tried clicking "skip this" (or equivalent) but that link didn't work.
The worst part of Academia.edu: you must log in to download the PDFs.
This could be useful, except for the fact that you have to register to download the pdfs.
It would be great if researchers and scientists can search for every single published journal articles on Academia.edu. I used to be a chemist and my college had a great search system. After I graduated, I lost access to that database and have been looking for a tool that will allow me to look for articles.
- 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.