10 ms·

The end of Academia.edu: How business takes over

195 points by merraksh 9y ago

PaulHoule 9y ago
I think 8 euro a month is not a huge price to pay. Open access systems have a hard time getting ongoing funding; arxiv did not have the beginning of a sustainable plan before it was 20 yrs old, and it had near death experiences in the meantime.
- elsjaako 9y ago
  As far as I understand, most people don't have a problem with journals charging money. The problem is the extortionate amount they charge while using free labor. Usually when I want to read something academic it's about 30 eur per article. 8 eur per month seems reasonable if they provide a good service.
- scottLobster 9y ago
  Yeah, the author seems caught up in his idealism. "The problem with Academia.edu is that it is a commercial enterprise. It is not created to serve the common good – diffusing knowledge. It is also not created to serve democratic ideals, but to make money." I wonder if this guy has a mortgage or kids, and how many unpaid hours he puts in per week "for the common good". I could understand if they were gouging people, but as you say 8 euro per month hardly seems unreasonable. The site owners are under no obligation to run a charity simply to appease Mr. Maly's morality.
  - a3_nm 9y ago
    Most of academic research is not a for-profit enterprise and aims at serving the common good: scientists don't make direct monetary profit from the articles that they write. Knowing that this "idealist" system appears to work, one would expect that a not-for-profit service analogous to Academia.edu would not be a completely unrealistic dream... This is why Academia.edu is disliked by the author and other academics: they are building a for-profit service on top on the not-for-profit system of academic research.
    - OJFord 9y ago
      > Most of academic research is not a for-profit enterprise and aims at serving the common good: scientists don't make direct monetary profit from the articles that they write. It is, usually, however their job and career: they do make indirect monetary profit.
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      Academia.edu is awful, but it's silly to think that just because academics work at non-profit institutions that all their tools should be provided by non-profits. I've purchased many pieces of software to help with my research and I don't expect the developers to do it out of the kindness of their heart.
    - scottLobster 9y ago
      They do get paid, just more indirectly in the form of grants. It may not be for "profit", but scientists don't work for free or publish purely out of altruism. As for building for-profit services on top of not-for-profit research, I don't see the issue. Would it be equally immoral to sell or even lease Bibles to churches since churches are financially reliant on donations? The beauty of Capitalism is it tells you what people are willing to put money/time towards. If enough of the scientific community feels so strongly that academic research should be accessible for free via some sort of charity, they are welcome to start and manage said charity and/or refuse to buy subscriptions to Academia.edu. I honestly wish them luck, a free, open service for such knowledge would be awesome! However, proclaiming that others are morally obligated to provide that charity, simply because they market their service to "charities", sounds rather arrogant to me.
    - jasonlotito 9y ago
      If this is true, why don't they just release their work on their own sites under a permissive license? It seems like such a simple problem to solve.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    True, but Mr. Maly has no need to help, or support Academia.edu. I went to some early talks from them, and they make a big deal about how they weren't like the big old evil journals. If they are just going to turn into something much like the old journals, and lock our data behind a paywall, then what advantage do they provide? In particular, they themselves don't provide open access to the database they are building, so if they ever decide to take their ball and go home, we've lost everything they collected.
- a3_nm 9y ago
  > I think 8 euro a month is not a huge price to pay. It's a price that readers (people who wish to access scientific articles) have to pay: this is unacceptable no matter the amount. > [arXiv] had near death experiences in the meantime I have never heard about this before, do you have any specific reference?
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    The problem is that starting free, promising the world, locking "customers" into your ecosystems, and then forcing them to pay for a service you used to provide for free is bad. It's really, really bad. Potentially suicidally bad. In this case the nominal price is reasonable - but the cost in lost trust and goodwill certainly isn't, and may turn out to be more than a.e can afford to pay.
  - grigjd3 9y ago
    Arxiv submitters were sent pleas for funding at least twice during the 2000's. I don't have the emails because I no longer work at the schools that gave me those email accounts.
  - lucio 9y ago
    It seems that you DON'T have to pay to read the article.
- makmanalp 9y ago
  I've just never seen anything but spammy content on academia.edu - to the point where I avoid clicking on it. Arxiv is the exact opposite. It's brimming with quality content that often gets published in journals afterwards. That could be worth 8 euro a month.
merraksh 9y ago
How to reproduce: 1) log in 2) search your favorite author 3) verify there are zero results in normal search and n>0 in advanced search (as the normal search is on paper titles only) 4) proceed to advanced search, find monthly subscription offer. It doesn't feel too good having uploaded some of my articles there, and I hope other similar services (ResearchGate) won't do the same.
amelius 9y ago
Perhaps public internet services should really be created in, well, academia and government organizations, like in the old days (think email). At least then we'll see some federation, openness of data where useful, and as a bonus, everything will be devoid of ads and user-tracking.
- hedora 9y ago
  I'd take it a step further. After the dot com crash, craigslist basically destroyed the entire classified ad industry by being free and good enough. I want that for social (without ads/tracking/vc money/invasive monetization, and with strong privacy, author's rights and archival properties). The cost per user of operating these social network sites must be plummeting with hardware costs. Clearly diaspora didn't quite get the formula right. Soon someone will, I hope.
  - earthboundkid 9y ago
    I agree that this is a good goal, but Craigslist had some unusual advantages against classifieds: they undercut the cost and were national; newspapers were in denial about the internet, lacked technical knowhow, and fragmented into many local markets. I think if you made a good, free Facebook killer, Facebook wouldn't just let itself be taken by surprise to the same degree.
- _delirium 9y ago
  At least for paper archival, this is starting to happen. Most large universities now have an institutional paper repository, and are gradually moving towards making it mandatory for grad students and profs to deposit their papers there. Not all have great interfaces, but hopefully that'll improve. And they do at least tend to be good on the interoperability part, with good metadata, stable URLs, etc.
- amelius 9y ago
  Of course, the big companies can still provide hardware or infrastructure in general. But any algorithm handling our personal data should be strictly out of the hands of those companies.
sunir 9y ago
The author should ask his librarian how much the school pays for access to journals, preferably while seated and not eating anything lest he choke.
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  But academia.edu does not replace the broken system of those journals, it just adds an additional broken layer at an extra cost. Oh well. I logged in, verified that it shows the same broken behavior, then deleted my account. I wasn't really using it anyway. There are both better search engines and better ways of self-hosting my publications.
AdamSC1 9y ago
Considering how much institutes pay for journal licenses or the $20 - $50 I pay for a single article, I don't have much of an issue with $8 a month to find the right article. Not to mention, you can still find articles for free if the keyword is in the title or keyword abstract so the $8 a month isn't necessary. That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a rev-share model (like old platforms like Squidoo) for popular article authors who are sharing their work for free. With a growing amount of works coming from poorly paid adjuncts, while journals, publishers and institutions continue to rake in huge money, it'd be good to see some of this flowing back to the researchers who work to support the open access of knowledge.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  But, you still have to pay to buy the article, and usually you can find the article with Google -- so basically I find you are paying for an inferior google.
  - Anderkent 9y ago
    Surely if you can find the article on google, you don't need their advanced content search; you know the title and can use the simple search
- vram22 9y ago
  >That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a rev-share model (like old platforms like Squidoo) for popular article authors who are sharing their work for free. Squidoo was created by Seth Godin (among others), IIRC. Would be interesting to know whether their biz model worked, even if for a while.
hprotagonist 9y ago
academia.edu always smelled weird to me. I guess i was right!
jccalhoun 9y ago
I have never liked academia.edu. I always found it pointless. If I want to share my academic work I'll put it on my own web site. I also found it weird that they had a .edu address (apparently they bought it before the rules were put in place and so they are grandfathered in) Whenever I searched for a paper and google found an academia.edu link my process was, click on the link, oh crap it wants me to log in, what's my password again? fuck it, I'll just go to scihub.
- jmiserez 9y ago
  Also e.g. the ACM copyright agreement explicitly allows you to host your own papers on your own website, even though you've assigned copyright to ACM. I don't think this applies to places like academia.edu or Researchgate, but IANAL.
- count 9y ago
  They didn't buy it before the rules were put in place. They launched in 2008 as a company, and the the .edu was restricted to accredited institutions in 2001. In 2006, the rules were tightened to restrict even transfer by a previous owner to a non-accredited institution. I've complained to EDUCASE (the .edu TLD contract holder), and suggest others do the same. A for profit, non-accredited non-higher learning organization should NOT have a .EDU. What I sent EDUCAUSE: Hello, The owner of the ‘academia.edu’ domain name appears to be operating in violation of the EDU TLD requirements. The WHOIS record: Registrant: Academia 251 Kearny St suite 520 San Francisco, CA 94108 UNITED STATES Is not an accredited institution according the US Dept. of Education.
  - bobbyi_settv 9y ago
    Where are you getting the info that they "bought" the domain name from the original owner? I was told that one of the founders was a professor or somesuch and he originally registered the name in the 90's but hadn't been using it, so he used it when he started the company. If so, I imagine that involved a "transfer" from his personal ownership to that of the company and that may fall under that 2006 rule, but it it still isn't the same situation as someone "squatting" on a edu name and then auctioning it off to startups looking for a cool name, which is what I think EDUCASE is concerned with.
digitalzombie 9y ago
I stumbled across academia.edu trying to grab a syllabus from some university to find books to supplement my learning. It was so spammy. I didn't get why the professor website point all his research towards academia.edu. He could have posted it on his website or github. The website demand from the get go your info and you have to create account to even get stuff. It's similar to quora. Quora survived with its quality like posts/answers but I still disagree with this type of model.
- vog 9y ago
  Pardon my ignorance, but is Quora still a thing? I thought it was largely made obsolete by the various StackExchange sites and networks.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Insanity 9y ago
    There are differences though as far as I am aware. I am not a Quora user but I believe that Quora is okay with more subjective questions whereas the StackExchange network does not really like that. If you take a look here: http://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask http://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask you can find more of the type of questions you can not ask. Take a question like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16318868/books-or-other-resources-for-java-to-cocoa-transition http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16318868/books-or-other-r... And a question like this: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-development-tools-for-a-Java-Developer https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-development-tools-fo... :-)
    - cormacrelf 9y ago
      But that's also true of almost every other place on the internet; if you'll pardon the pun, StackOverflow is the Exception. Quora's utility is a tiny subset of, for example, Reddit's /r/AskReddit. Except it does away with the community vibe and what is at least somewhat a meritocracy on Reddit and replaces it with being an already-well-known figure or someone who can sell their reputation well enough. Half the questions are directed at specific people anyway, which is quite bizarre: 'What was Elon Musk's GPA at UPenn?'. If you want to have a Q&A session with a famous person, /r/AMA is much better. In general, there's nothing stopping you from asking and collecting questions and answers anywhere else on the internet, so why do we need a specialist? Quora's Q&A implementation has nothing to set it apart from SO, or even Twitter threads. More importantly, in terms of user base, most conceivable questions have a better place to be asked than Quora. For some of them, that place is Reddit or StackExchange, or even your favourite Elon Musk fan-fiction club. For the rest, there is probably a community out there that isn't limited to the open Q&A format that users on Quora try to shoehorn everything into. The one topic that seems to do inordinately well on Quora is questions about startups, because respondents can tout how successful they are when they give you an answer and be upvoted according to how well they do that. This is the rare case that people are actually looking for reputation rather than content. If you're looking for people with life experience, AskReddit does a great job of promoting answers where people take the time to tell a story. Subreddits (like /r/malefashionadvice, for example) do a great job of organising communities around common interest with lots of Q&As and beginner guides thrown in. If you want what Quora purports to provide, just find any old community online with the people you want to hear from and ask it there instead.
mankash666 9y ago
Google scholar solves the same problem, for free. HTTPS://Scholar.Google.com
lottin 9y ago
While I fully agree that the academic journal industry is a money extraction racket that needs to be put out of business, I don't see how academia.edu was contributing towards that end. The simple solution is for governments to require that the research that they fund be published under a free license of some sort.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  Can we start this at the ballot iniative level? I imagine that if the change was worded like "An inatiative that requires free, public access to all government funded research" would be a relatively non-partisan issue.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    >a relatively non-partisan issue. Were it were so. I think you'll find some rather strenuous objections to your moderate proposal, though that's not so much partisanship as a very loud minority of a minority of the population stridently pursuing their ideology.
    - jdavis703 9y ago
      What "strenous" arguments would occur against this?
      - jhbadger 9y ago
        The for-profit publishing industry (and politicians they donate to) have argued time and again that their business model needs to be defended in order for science to function and that things like open repositories are bad. The (defeated) 2012 Research Works Act would have essentially destroyed the largest repository PubMed Central by eliminating the open access provisions of the NIH Public Access Policy.
kayhi 9y ago
Looks like the startup is trying different approaches to increase their revenue. Paid monthly subscription and analytics charges to the end user. I guess the author thinks it is the end of the platform, which is possible. I'm just hesitate to immediately conclude the business is done because of this choice. If the paid upgrades don't provide enough value the people won't sign up and maybe they will focus on another way. Research Gate is very similar site that sells ad space and for job postings so maybe they will head in that direction.
twoslide 9y ago
The general point is a good one. However, the specific issue the author raises (paid advanced search) is easily avoided with google's "site" operator, e.g. "potterheads site:academia.edu"
sectest331 9y ago
test
RichardPrice 9y ago
Hi, I'm the founder of Academia.edu. The author of the article objects to the introduction of a freemium model on Academia.edu, and specifically to the idea of advanced search being in the premium set of features. Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the internet, available for free, and to develop a more rigorous and efficient peer review system. Free access to academic research makes the world a more equitable place, and rigorous and efficient peer review accelerates the pace of scientific and scholarly research. Academia launched in 2008, and now around 35 million people use the site a month. Around 19 million papers have been uploaded, and are freely available on the platform. Forty percent of Academia’s users are from developing countries and would otherwise have limited access to academic research. In order to achieve Academia’s goals, Academia is working to become a sustainable operation. In order to do that, we introduced Academia Premium, which includes extra features such as Readers, Mentions, Expanded Analytics and Advanced Search. - Readers tells you who is reading your papers - Mentions alerts you when papers are uploaded mentioning your name - Expanded Analytics provides a more detailed look at what kinds of people visit your profile and how people find your papers - Advanced Search allows you to find exact keyword matches in the full text of every paper on Academia In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided that features related to the mission of the company should be free. This means that features related to open access (free access to uploading and downloading papers), and features related to peer review (sessions, recommendations) are free. As we add new features to Premium, we will continue to ensure that features related to the mission (open access, sessions, recommendations) are free. We are grateful to all the academics who have contributed to Academia, and we will continue to serve academics from around the world.
- danra 9y ago
  > Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the internet, available for free > In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided that features related to the mission of the company should be free That's absurd. Open access to an ocean of articles without the ability to search through them is meaningless. While you do allow search in titles, thus providing some ability to locate relevant material, presenting content search as some premium feature in 2017 is ridiculous.
benl 9y ago
Hi, I'm Ben, CTO of Academia. Everyone who works at Academia would love it if we were able to make advanced search free. When we first decided to build a premium account, we also made the decision to not take anything out of the free account. Strange as it may seem, the free account never had full-text search because we couldn't justify the cost of building it (full-text search of 20MM PDFs at our traffic levels is expensive to operate). We built it for the premium account because people asked for it in our initial research - and we would love to be able to eventually move it into the free account. On the team we all agree that we want to keep building premium features in order to make the platform sustainable. The author of this article takes the view that advanced search is not a feature that should be paid-for. My view is that we intend keep building features until we have something that is worthy of his support. The support of the academics who use and enjoy the platform, both in free and paid accounts, is what will keep it around and growing for the long term.
- zajd 9y ago
  > On the team we all agree that we want to keep building premium features in order to make the platform sustainable. Is there any concern that paywalling features will reduce the number of users on the site?
  - benl 9y ago
    Yes, we don't want that to happen. That's one reason (but not the only reason) that we haven't paywalled any of the existing free features.
- merraksh 9y ago
  I think it would be a little easier to accept (and probably easy to implement) if, in addition to title search, authors and keywords were also searchable. A search for my PhD advisor's last name results in 0 papers, though I uploaded a few papers that he and I coauthored.
  - benl 9y ago
    That's a good idea. It's already possible to search for author names separately and then find the papers on their profile (if they have one), and it's also possible to search for a research interest tag and find the papers tagged with it. It would make sense to unify those with the title search.
XenophileJKO 9y ago
If I go to google now and type in "site:academia.edu Potterheads" I get the 26 papers alluded to in the linked article.
tomcam 9y ago
How does a commercial enterprise even get a .EDU domain? I tried to obtain one for the local private high school, and was told it's available only to institutes of higher learning.
SubiculumCode 9y ago
Ihave both Academia.edu and Researchgate accounts. For themost part, everyone I know uses it as a kind of cv and repository for preprints of articles published in the usual suspect journals, and not as a replacement for journals.
csa 9y ago
Academia.edu have the right idea, but their execution sucks. - Signing up is an exercise is spam. Most of the people who are willing to endure the whole thing are the least desirable customers (i.e., folks with more style than substance). - Their onboarding process sucks. Most popular researchers will not jump through the hoops necessary to get their stuff on board. There is no compelling reason to be on there at this point. Within the first 30-60 secs, there is no "hell yeah!" moment. - The issues of what constitutes "previously published" for elite journals is potentially probelmatic (although it shouldn't be in this case). - The obvious gift of a research "family tree" has not been offered. Being able to identify distant relatives on this tree has ridiculously high value that has not been manifested. - The recommendation engine sucks. For someone writing a paper on a certain topic, a.e should be able to crank out a fairly accurate list of papers you will want to read or cite before you write. This would be very high value add if done well. A.e whiffed on this one, too. There is a huge need for what a.e is offering or could offer, but their execution has been pretty terrible. It seems like they are optimizing metrics for their funders rather than their customers. If that site does die, I will gladly take it off of their hands, give them 10% equity to leave, and turn it into a ubiquitous resource for academics and researchers. They really need to stop drinking the Bay Area kool aid and figure out what their core customers want... and then deliver that.
neumann 9y ago
I refuse to sign up to Academia and ResearchGate, for-profit companies that are littering indexes with pay-wall accessible PDFs that should be available through institutional login, or the author's website. And now, through sci-hub. Google scholar paired with sci-hub has become the fastest way to access papers given that institutional subscriptions are scatter gun. 1. Find paper on scholar.google.com 2. Find PDF or pay-wall 3. Click the sci-hub bookmarklet If I want to discover papers from my field, I talk to my colleagues. Another wall-garden I do not need.

195 points by merraksh 9y ago

I think 8 euro a month is not a huge price to pay. Open access systems have a hard time getting ongoing funding; arxiv did not have the beginning of a sustainable plan before it was 20 yrs old, and it had near death experiences in the meantime.

elsjaako 9y ago
As far as I understand, most people don't have a problem with journals charging money. The problem is the extortionate amount they charge while using free labor. Usually when I want to read something academic it's about 30 eur per article. 8 eur per month seems reasonable if they provide a good service.
scottLobster 9y ago
Yeah, the author seems caught up in his idealism. "The problem with Academia.edu is that it is a commercial enterprise. It is not created to serve the common good – diffusing knowledge. It is also not created to serve democratic ideals, but to make money." I wonder if this guy has a mortgage or kids, and how many unpaid hours he puts in per week "for the common good". I could understand if they were gouging people, but as you say 8 euro per month hardly seems unreasonable. The site owners are under no obligation to run a charity simply to appease Mr. Maly's morality.
- a3_nm 9y ago
  Most of academic research is not a for-profit enterprise and aims at serving the common good: scientists don't make direct monetary profit from the articles that they write. Knowing that this "idealist" system appears to work, one would expect that a not-for-profit service analogous to Academia.edu would not be a completely unrealistic dream... This is why Academia.edu is disliked by the author and other academics: they are building a for-profit service on top on the not-for-profit system of academic research.
  - OJFord 9y ago
    > Most of academic research is not a for-profit enterprise and aims at serving the common good: scientists don't make direct monetary profit from the articles that they write. It is, usually, however their job and career: they do make indirect monetary profit.
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    Academia.edu is awful, but it's silly to think that just because academics work at non-profit institutions that all their tools should be provided by non-profits. I've purchased many pieces of software to help with my research and I don't expect the developers to do it out of the kindness of their heart.
  - scottLobster 9y ago
    They do get paid, just more indirectly in the form of grants. It may not be for "profit", but scientists don't work for free or publish purely out of altruism. As for building for-profit services on top of not-for-profit research, I don't see the issue. Would it be equally immoral to sell or even lease Bibles to churches since churches are financially reliant on donations? The beauty of Capitalism is it tells you what people are willing to put money/time towards. If enough of the scientific community feels so strongly that academic research should be accessible for free via some sort of charity, they are welcome to start and manage said charity and/or refuse to buy subscriptions to Academia.edu. I honestly wish them luck, a free, open service for such knowledge would be awesome! However, proclaiming that others are morally obligated to provide that charity, simply because they market their service to "charities", sounds rather arrogant to me.
  - jasonlotito 9y ago
    If this is true, why don't they just release their work on their own sites under a permissive license? It seems like such a simple problem to solve.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  True, but Mr. Maly has no need to help, or support Academia.edu. I went to some early talks from them, and they make a big deal about how they weren't like the big old evil journals. If they are just going to turn into something much like the old journals, and lock our data behind a paywall, then what advantage do they provide? In particular, they themselves don't provide open access to the database they are building, so if they ever decide to take their ball and go home, we've lost everything they collected.
a3_nm 9y ago
> I think 8 euro a month is not a huge price to pay. It's a price that readers (people who wish to access scientific articles) have to pay: this is unacceptable no matter the amount. > [arXiv] had near death experiences in the meantime I have never heard about this before, do you have any specific reference?
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  The problem is that starting free, promising the world, locking "customers" into your ecosystems, and then forcing them to pay for a service you used to provide for free is bad. It's really, really bad. Potentially suicidally bad. In this case the nominal price is reasonable - but the cost in lost trust and goodwill certainly isn't, and may turn out to be more than a.e can afford to pay.
- grigjd3 9y ago
  Arxiv submitters were sent pleas for funding at least twice during the 2000's. I don't have the emails because I no longer work at the schools that gave me those email accounts.
- lucio 9y ago
  It seems that you DON'T have to pay to read the article.
makmanalp 9y ago
I've just never seen anything but spammy content on academia.edu - to the point where I avoid clicking on it. Arxiv is the exact opposite. It's brimming with quality content that often gets published in journals afterwards. That could be worth 8 euro a month.

merraksh 9y ago

How to reproduce: 1) log in 2) search your favorite author 3) verify there are zero results in normal search and n>0 in advanced search (as the normal search is on paper titles only) 4) proceed to advanced search, find monthly subscription offer. It doesn't feel too good having uploaded some of my articles there, and I hope other similar services (ResearchGate) won't do the same.

amelius 9y ago

Perhaps public internet services should really be created in, well, academia and government organizations, like in the old days (think email). At least then we'll see some federation, openness of data where useful, and as a bonus, everything will be devoid of ads and user-tracking.

hedora 9y ago
I'd take it a step further. After the dot com crash, craigslist basically destroyed the entire classified ad industry by being free and good enough. I want that for social (without ads/tracking/vc money/invasive monetization, and with strong privacy, author's rights and archival properties). The cost per user of operating these social network sites must be plummeting with hardware costs. Clearly diaspora didn't quite get the formula right. Soon someone will, I hope.
- earthboundkid 9y ago
  I agree that this is a good goal, but Craigslist had some unusual advantages against classifieds: they undercut the cost and were national; newspapers were in denial about the internet, lacked technical knowhow, and fragmented into many local markets. I think if you made a good, free Facebook killer, Facebook wouldn't just let itself be taken by surprise to the same degree.
_delirium 9y ago
At least for paper archival, this is starting to happen. Most large universities now have an institutional paper repository, and are gradually moving towards making it mandatory for grad students and profs to deposit their papers there. Not all have great interfaces, but hopefully that'll improve. And they do at least tend to be good on the interoperability part, with good metadata, stable URLs, etc.
amelius 9y ago
Of course, the big companies can still provide hardware or infrastructure in general. But any algorithm handling our personal data should be strictly out of the hands of those companies.

sunir 9y ago

The author should ask his librarian how much the school pays for access to journals, preferably while seated and not eating anything lest he choke.

tom_mellior 9y ago
But academia.edu does not replace the broken system of those journals, it just adds an additional broken layer at an extra cost. Oh well. I logged in, verified that it shows the same broken behavior, then deleted my account. I wasn't really using it anyway. There are both better search engines and better ways of self-hosting my publications.

AdamSC1 9y ago

Considering how much institutes pay for journal licenses or the $20 - $50 I pay for a single article, I don't have much of an issue with $8 a month to find the right article. Not to mention, you can still find articles for free if the keyword is in the title or keyword abstract so the $8 a month isn't necessary. That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a rev-share model (like old platforms like Squidoo) for popular article authors who are sharing their work for free. With a growing amount of works coming from poorly paid adjuncts, while journals, publishers and institutions continue to rake in huge money, it'd be good to see some of this flowing back to the researchers who work to support the open access of knowledge.

CJefferson 9y ago
But, you still have to pay to buy the article, and usually you can find the article with Google -- so basically I find you are paying for an inferior google.
- Anderkent 9y ago
  Surely if you can find the article on google, you don't need their advanced content search; you know the title and can use the simple search
vram22 9y ago
>That said, I wouldn't mind seeing a rev-share model (like old platforms like Squidoo) for popular article authors who are sharing their work for free. Squidoo was created by Seth Godin (among others), IIRC. Would be interesting to know whether their biz model worked, even if for a while.

hprotagonist 9y ago

academia.edu always smelled weird to me. I guess i was right!

jccalhoun 9y ago

I have never liked academia.edu. I always found it pointless. If I want to share my academic work I'll put it on my own web site. I also found it weird that they had a .edu address (apparently they bought it before the rules were put in place and so they are grandfathered in) Whenever I searched for a paper and google found an academia.edu link my process was, click on the link, oh crap it wants me to log in, what's my password again? fuck it, I'll just go to scihub.

jmiserez 9y ago
Also e.g. the ACM copyright agreement explicitly allows you to host your own papers on your own website, even though you've assigned copyright to ACM. I don't think this applies to places like academia.edu or Researchgate, but IANAL.
count 9y ago
They didn't buy it before the rules were put in place. They launched in 2008 as a company, and the the .edu was restricted to accredited institutions in 2001. In 2006, the rules were tightened to restrict even transfer by a previous owner to a non-accredited institution. I've complained to EDUCASE (the .edu TLD contract holder), and suggest others do the same. A for profit, non-accredited non-higher learning organization should NOT have a .EDU. What I sent EDUCAUSE: Hello, The owner of the ‘academia.edu’ domain name appears to be operating in violation of the EDU TLD requirements. The WHOIS record: Registrant: Academia 251 Kearny St suite 520 San Francisco, CA 94108 UNITED STATES Is not an accredited institution according the US Dept. of Education.
- bobbyi_settv 9y ago
  Where are you getting the info that they "bought" the domain name from the original owner? I was told that one of the founders was a professor or somesuch and he originally registered the name in the 90's but hadn't been using it, so he used it when he started the company. If so, I imagine that involved a "transfer" from his personal ownership to that of the company and that may fall under that 2006 rule, but it it still isn't the same situation as someone "squatting" on a edu name and then auctioning it off to startups looking for a cool name, which is what I think EDUCASE is concerned with.

digitalzombie 9y ago

I stumbled across academia.edu trying to grab a syllabus from some university to find books to supplement my learning. It was so spammy. I didn't get why the professor website point all his research towards academia.edu. He could have posted it on his website or github. The website demand from the get go your info and you have to create account to even get stuff. It's similar to quora. Quora survived with its quality like posts/answers but I still disagree with this type of model.

vog 9y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but is Quora still a thing? I thought it was largely made obsolete by the various StackExchange sites and networks.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Insanity 9y ago
  There are differences though as far as I am aware. I am not a Quora user but I believe that Quora is okay with more subjective questions whereas the StackExchange network does not really like that. If you take a look here: http://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask http://stackoverflow.com/help/dont-ask you can find more of the type of questions you can not ask. Take a question like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16318868/books-or-other-resources-for-java-to-cocoa-transition http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16318868/books-or-other-r... And a question like this: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-development-tools-for-a-Java-Developer https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-development-tools-fo... :-)
  - cormacrelf 9y ago
    But that's also true of almost every other place on the internet; if you'll pardon the pun, StackOverflow is the Exception. Quora's utility is a tiny subset of, for example, Reddit's /r/AskReddit. Except it does away with the community vibe and what is at least somewhat a meritocracy on Reddit and replaces it with being an already-well-known figure or someone who can sell their reputation well enough. Half the questions are directed at specific people anyway, which is quite bizarre: 'What was Elon Musk's GPA at UPenn?'. If you want to have a Q&A session with a famous person, /r/AMA is much better. In general, there's nothing stopping you from asking and collecting questions and answers anywhere else on the internet, so why do we need a specialist? Quora's Q&A implementation has nothing to set it apart from SO, or even Twitter threads. More importantly, in terms of user base, most conceivable questions have a better place to be asked than Quora. For some of them, that place is Reddit or StackExchange, or even your favourite Elon Musk fan-fiction club. For the rest, there is probably a community out there that isn't limited to the open Q&A format that users on Quora try to shoehorn everything into. The one topic that seems to do inordinately well on Quora is questions about startups, because respondents can tout how successful they are when they give you an answer and be upvoted according to how well they do that. This is the rare case that people are actually looking for reputation rather than content. If you're looking for people with life experience, AskReddit does a great job of promoting answers where people take the time to tell a story. Subreddits (like /r/malefashionadvice, for example) do a great job of organising communities around common interest with lots of Q&As and beginner guides thrown in. If you want what Quora purports to provide, just find any old community online with the people you want to hear from and ask it there instead.

mankash666 9y ago

Google scholar solves the same problem, for free. HTTPS://Scholar.Google.com

lottin 9y ago

While I fully agree that the academic journal industry is a money extraction racket that needs to be put out of business, I don't see how academia.edu was contributing towards that end. The simple solution is for governments to require that the research that they fund be published under a free license of some sort.

jdavis703 9y ago
Can we start this at the ballot iniative level? I imagine that if the change was worded like "An inatiative that requires free, public access to all government funded research" would be a relatively non-partisan issue.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  >a relatively non-partisan issue. Were it were so. I think you'll find some rather strenuous objections to your moderate proposal, though that's not so much partisanship as a very loud minority of a minority of the population stridently pursuing their ideology.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    What "strenous" arguments would occur against this?
    - jhbadger 9y ago
      The for-profit publishing industry (and politicians they donate to) have argued time and again that their business model needs to be defended in order for science to function and that things like open repositories are bad. The (defeated) 2012 Research Works Act would have essentially destroyed the largest repository PubMed Central by eliminating the open access provisions of the NIH Public Access Policy.

kayhi 9y ago

Looks like the startup is trying different approaches to increase their revenue. Paid monthly subscription and analytics charges to the end user. I guess the author thinks it is the end of the platform, which is possible. I'm just hesitate to immediately conclude the business is done because of this choice. If the paid upgrades don't provide enough value the people won't sign up and maybe they will focus on another way. Research Gate is very similar site that sells ad space and for job postings so maybe they will head in that direction.

twoslide 9y ago

The general point is a good one. However, the specific issue the author raises (paid advanced search) is easily avoided with google's "site" operator, e.g. "potterheads site:academia.edu"

sectest331 9y ago

test

RichardPrice 9y ago

Hi, I'm the founder of Academia.edu. The author of the article objects to the introduction of a freemium model on Academia.edu, and specifically to the idea of advanced search being in the premium set of features. Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the internet, available for free, and to develop a more rigorous and efficient peer review system. Free access to academic research makes the world a more equitable place, and rigorous and efficient peer review accelerates the pace of scientific and scholarly research. Academia launched in 2008, and now around 35 million people use the site a month. Around 19 million papers have been uploaded, and are freely available on the platform. Forty percent of Academia’s users are from developing countries and would otherwise have limited access to academic research. In order to achieve Academia’s goals, Academia is working to become a sustainable operation. In order to do that, we introduced Academia Premium, which includes extra features such as Readers, Mentions, Expanded Analytics and Advanced Search. - Readers tells you who is reading your papers - Mentions alerts you when papers are uploaded mentioning your name - Expanded Analytics provides a more detailed look at what kinds of people visit your profile and how people find your papers - Advanced Search allows you to find exact keyword matches in the full text of every paper on Academia In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided that features related to the mission of the company should be free. This means that features related to open access (free access to uploading and downloading papers), and features related to peer review (sessions, recommendations) are free. As we add new features to Premium, we will continue to ensure that features related to the mission (open access, sessions, recommendations) are free. We are grateful to all the academics who have contributed to Academia, and we will continue to serve academics from around the world.

danra 9y ago
> Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the internet, available for free > In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided that features related to the mission of the company should be free That's absurd. Open access to an ocean of articles without the ability to search through them is meaningless. While you do allow search in titles, thus providing some ability to locate relevant material, presenting content search as some premium feature in 2017 is ridiculous.

benl 9y ago

Hi, I'm Ben, CTO of Academia. Everyone who works at Academia would love it if we were able to make advanced search free. When we first decided to build a premium account, we also made the decision to not take anything out of the free account. Strange as it may seem, the free account never had full-text search because we couldn't justify the cost of building it (full-text search of 20MM PDFs at our traffic levels is expensive to operate). We built it for the premium account because people asked for it in our initial research - and we would love to be able to eventually move it into the free account. On the team we all agree that we want to keep building premium features in order to make the platform sustainable. The author of this article takes the view that advanced search is not a feature that should be paid-for. My view is that we intend keep building features until we have something that is worthy of his support. The support of the academics who use and enjoy the platform, both in free and paid accounts, is what will keep it around and growing for the long term.

zajd 9y ago
> On the team we all agree that we want to keep building premium features in order to make the platform sustainable. Is there any concern that paywalling features will reduce the number of users on the site?
- benl 9y ago
  Yes, we don't want that to happen. That's one reason (but not the only reason) that we haven't paywalled any of the existing free features.
merraksh 9y ago
I think it would be a little easier to accept (and probably easy to implement) if, in addition to title search, authors and keywords were also searchable. A search for my PhD advisor's last name results in 0 papers, though I uploaded a few papers that he and I coauthored.
- benl 9y ago
  That's a good idea. It's already possible to search for author names separately and then find the papers on their profile (if they have one), and it's also possible to search for a research interest tag and find the papers tagged with it. It would make sense to unify those with the title search.

XenophileJKO 9y ago

If I go to google now and type in "site:academia.edu Potterheads" I get the 26 papers alluded to in the linked article.

tomcam 9y ago

How does a commercial enterprise even get a .EDU domain? I tried to obtain one for the local private high school, and was told it's available only to institutes of higher learning.

SubiculumCode 9y ago

Ihave both Academia.edu and Researchgate accounts. For themost part, everyone I know uses it as a kind of cv and repository for preprints of articles published in the usual suspect journals, and not as a replacement for journals.

csa 9y ago

Academia.edu have the right idea, but their execution sucks. - Signing up is an exercise is spam. Most of the people who are willing to endure the whole thing are the least desirable customers (i.e., folks with more style than substance). - Their onboarding process sucks. Most popular researchers will not jump through the hoops necessary to get their stuff on board. There is no compelling reason to be on there at this point. Within the first 30-60 secs, there is no "hell yeah!" moment. - The issues of what constitutes "previously published" for elite journals is potentially probelmatic (although it shouldn't be in this case). - The obvious gift of a research "family tree" has not been offered. Being able to identify distant relatives on this tree has ridiculously high value that has not been manifested. - The recommendation engine sucks. For someone writing a paper on a certain topic, a.e should be able to crank out a fairly accurate list of papers you will want to read or cite before you write. This would be very high value add if done well. A.e whiffed on this one, too. There is a huge need for what a.e is offering or could offer, but their execution has been pretty terrible. It seems like they are optimizing metrics for their funders rather than their customers. If that site does die, I will gladly take it off of their hands, give them 10% equity to leave, and turn it into a ubiquitous resource for academics and researchers. They really need to stop drinking the Bay Area kool aid and figure out what their core customers want... and then deliver that.

neumann 9y ago

I refuse to sign up to Academia and ResearchGate, for-profit companies that are littering indexes with pay-wall accessible PDFs that should be available through institutional login, or the author's website. And now, through sci-hub. Google scholar paired with sci-hub has become the fastest way to access papers given that institutional subscriptions are scatter gun. 1. Find paper on scholar.google.com 2. Find PDF or pay-wall 3. Click the sci-hub bookmarklet If I want to discover papers from my field, I talk to my colleagues. Another wall-garden I do not need.