When we first launched in September 2008, we did try creating a few thousand unclaimed profiles as an experiment, seeing if academics would claim them. Other si

When we first launched in September 2008, we did try creating a few thousand unclaimed profiles as an experiment, seeing if academics would claim them. Other sites like Spock.com and Spoke.com were also trying the 'claim your profile' approach. It turns out that it's a really bad strategy, and, in particular, you can't build a community like that. We turned the experiment off after about 3 months. It was an interesting lesson in how not to build a social platform. It's relatively difficult to know this a priori. You wouldn't believe how many people since we launched in September 2008 have said 'Hey, you should create profiles of academics at departments, and encourage them to claim them'. We learned by experiment that that's just not a good strategy for growing a community. Thanks for your thoughts about the our current product. Many academics write in to tell us that they are printing out their Stats Dashboards on Academia.edu and are including them with tenure track portfolios, as they are keen to demonstrate the global impact of their research, and we help them with that. Many academics feel that a tiny number of people read their papers, and they are incredibly happily surprised to see that, when they upload their papers to Academia.edu, their Stats Dashboard reveals that quite a few people read their papers, from several different countries. You say you were in Math, so you probably used the incredible www.arxiv.org for disseminating your Math papers. Some areas of Math and Physics (e.g. high energy physics) are lucky enough for a lot of their community to be using the Arxiv. For various reasons, the success of the Arxiv hasn't been mirrored in the pre-print repositories of other disciplines. None of the other pre-print repositories (SSRN, Repec) has got much traction - nothing close to the traction of the Arxiv. One way I think about building Academia.edu is to bring some of the magic of the instant distribution you find on the Arxiv to the other 95% of research - biology, medicine, chemistry etc. We think that bringing instant distribution to the 95% of research that Arxiv doesn't have strong penetration in could yield huge societal dividends. Faster sharing in, say, biology and medicine, could mean that cancer is cured 12 months before it otherwise would have. That would equate to millions of lives being saved. It's widely thought that science right now is too slow, and too closed. We are trying to change that, and accelerate research sharing.