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It's also worth noting that academia.edu is a for-profit enterprise. The domain academia.edu was purchased prior to the strictures put in place to ensure that

It's also worth noting that academia.edu is a for-profit enterprise. The domain academia.edu was purchased prior to the strictures put in place to ensure that only qualified educational institutions could register .edu domains, and has been grandfathered ever since. Academia.edu itself launched in 2008 apparently. The author of this piece very much has a horse in this game, and as a result I very much view his writing with a skeptical eye. There are serious and substantial problems with social models of publishing, especially when organizations/institutions start tying promotions and/or remuneration to metrics like impact factor (which itself is a proprietary formula). We should keep in mind to reward good science because it's good science, not just because it's popular.

RichardPrice 15y ago
I think you are getting the horse and the cart in the wrong order (to continue the horse analogies :) ). I started Academia.edu, after finishing my PhD at Oxford, because I believe that science, is too closed, and too slow, and that I think that we can build a faster, cheaper, and better system for disseminating research. You're wondering whether I'm asserting the things in the post because I started the company, but really it's the other way round. I started the company because I believe the philosophy expressed in the post. One has to be the change one wants to see in the world.
- knowtheory 15y ago
  I'm sad to see that someone downvoted factual information provided about you and the post you wrote. And I'm not asserting anything about your motivations for why you started a for-profit company. I agree with you that the publishing models we have currently are broken. At the same time, I'm not entirely happy with some of the changes that have taken place in the past 5-10 years. When you look to the changes that digital distribution have wrought in industries like the news media over a similar time span, the changes are not all healthy ones either from the perspective of publishers or consumers. The fact that HuffPo and Gawker have risen to the top of the pile as the sorts of money making enterprises is not such a great example to set. Moreover, I'm unconvinced that adding more eyeballs to papers is going to improve quality of review. If your assertion is that we can make scientific review faster and cheaper without a subsequent loss of quality (let's just say "more scalable"), then I'd love to hear your response to a claim i like to make. I'd assert that publishing scientific papers is more similar to the trials and travails of online media than it is to publishing source code. The thing that makes open source software work is that software behavior (broadly speaking) is verifiable. I can run your code and we can agree on the results, or you can tell me i'm an idiot for not configuring the software appropriately. I'd assert that FOSS scalability derives from this ability. More eyeballs helps because everyone is working from/over the same artifact. The same can't be said for most academic papers, because most academes don't even publish their raw data, let alone possess have the facilities or the will to publish verifiable algorithmic processes for arriving at their data. I'd love to see a project which encouraged better replicability and verification of results/test data. But you haven't suggested any of those things. P.S. absolutely, please do be the change you're looking for. But I'm not convinced that you're the change i'm looking for.

RichardPrice 15y ago

I think you are getting the horse and the cart in the wrong order (to continue the horse analogies :) ). I started Academia.edu, after finishing my PhD at Oxford, because I believe that science, is too closed, and too slow, and that I think that we can build a faster, cheaper, and better system for disseminating research. You're wondering whether I'm asserting the things in the post because I started the company, but really it's the other way round. I started the company because I believe the philosophy expressed in the post. One has to be the change one wants to see in the world.

knowtheory 15y ago
I'm sad to see that someone downvoted factual information provided about you and the post you wrote. And I'm not asserting anything about your motivations for why you started a for-profit company. I agree with you that the publishing models we have currently are broken. At the same time, I'm not entirely happy with some of the changes that have taken place in the past 5-10 years. When you look to the changes that digital distribution have wrought in industries like the news media over a similar time span, the changes are not all healthy ones either from the perspective of publishers or consumers. The fact that HuffPo and Gawker have risen to the top of the pile as the sorts of money making enterprises is not such a great example to set. Moreover, I'm unconvinced that adding more eyeballs to papers is going to improve quality of review. If your assertion is that we can make scientific review faster and cheaper without a subsequent loss of quality (let's just say "more scalable"), then I'd love to hear your response to a claim i like to make. I'd assert that publishing scientific papers is more similar to the trials and travails of online media than it is to publishing source code. The thing that makes open source software work is that software behavior (broadly speaking) is verifiable. I can run your code and we can agree on the results, or you can tell me i'm an idiot for not configuring the software appropriately. I'd assert that FOSS scalability derives from this ability. More eyeballs helps because everyone is working from/over the same artifact. The same can't be said for most academic papers, because most academes don't even publish their raw data, let alone possess have the facilities or the will to publish verifiable algorithmic processes for arriving at their data. I'd love to see a project which encouraged better replicability and verification of results/test data. But you haven't suggested any of those things. P.S. absolutely, please do be the change you're looking for. But I'm not convinced that you're the change i'm looking for.