4 ms·

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 mo

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.

simonster 14y ago
> 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.)
- benl 14y ago
  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.
  - simonster 14y ago
    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.
SebySaid 14y ago
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.
fl3tch 14y ago
> 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.

simonster 14y ago

> 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.)

benl 14y ago
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.
- simonster 14y ago
  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.

SebySaid 14y ago

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.

fl3tch 14y ago

> 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.