6 ms·

The Story Behind a Radical New Idea: A Social Network for Academia

41 points by RichardPrice 13y ago

afandian 13y ago
Worth mentioning Orcid.org. Solves broadly the same problem. No need to get profit involved.
- smokinn 13y ago
  One of the problems with for-profit is that the company is likely to sell its community out if they think that'll make them more money. See: Elsevier buying Mendeley and the backlash from that: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/apr/10/elsevier-buys-mendeley-academic-reaction http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/201... This Onion talk put it really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_m6U1f9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_...
  - X4 13y ago
    @smokinn thank you for the great video! I didn't know that the onion had such quality talks. I personally use Mendeley, but only to obtain other people's Papers and sync my Bibtex fies. @afandian NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia. Generally speaking, I really don't get what's good about those platforms. Can anyone try to explain why people keep using it for another thing than peer-pressure?? I mean you upload a damn pdf with some meta-data attached to it. What's so hard? Use XMPP/IRC or Usenet for the communication and you're set, I must be dumb. I don't see why there is a need for those "new social networks". When email/mailing-lists/irc/xmpp/usenet/forums etc. already exist.
    - gjuggler 13y ago
      A large chunk of ORCID actually is open source: https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source (though I don't necessarily agree that it should be, since ORCID is not a library or tool, but rather a service that only has real value if there's a single instance in existence). I think there's a misunderstanding here on what ORCID is exactly. The name is an acronym for "Open Researcher and Contributor ID." It has nothing to do with publishing, but rather is being built as a central arbiter of academic identity. Academics love to measure their importance by the papers they've authored or co-authored. Most databases currently track the names of authors associated with each published paper. But names are frustratingly ambiguous or degenerate, which makes it difficult to do things like create an auto-updated list of all the papers you've published. ORCID is a publisher-funded non profit designed to reduce ambiguity in author identification, by simply assigning a UUID to every researcher. This is a case of publishers agreeing that collaboratively funding a single, centralized technical solution will benefit everyone much more than having a bunch of competing, siloed systems.
    - afandian 13y ago
      Sorry I didn't understand your comment "NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia". Could you clarify?
      - X4 13y ago
        Not worth it for academia means, that academia deserves something better than a vendor lock-in, by some closed-source software. It deserves a medium that doesn't stand in it's way, but empowers students/professors, scientists and other people, instead of depowering them by centralizing all power to one login provider. Academia is about innovation and sharing knowledge. A gatekeeper or a closed-source platform inevitably creates a bottleneck that slows innovation and knowledge sharing down. Furthermore, a social network as Academia requires a medium that adapts to it's need, not the other way around, therefore an optimal solution can only be opensource.
- verisimilidude 13y ago
  ORCID is sneaky in the way it's integrating itself into existing publisher workflows so seamlessly. All the vendors up and down the traditional academic publishing food chain seem to be racing to support it.
  - afandian 13y ago
    ORCID is non-profit. There are some organisations, such as ORCID, who exist for the purpose of facilitating the academic publishing 'industry' rather than making money out of it. Sometimes a businessperson spots an opportunity and exploits it. Sometimes people who all have a common problem get together and try to solve it.
    - verisimilidude 13y ago
      Uh, yes. Maybe I should clarify my own point. I suspect we're going to see ORCID explode in usage and popularity over the next few years. And I don't think that's going to be driven by authors, at first. It's going to be driven by the publishers. This is going to be possible because of how well ORCID integrates with the current world of online academic publishing. So imagine in a year or two, a journal like Nature hypothetically says, "We have this cool feature now called ORCID, and all authors submitting manuscripts MUST provide an ORCID ID. You'll love it, we swear." Then the same authors try to get another paper published, maybe in an Elsevier journal, and suddenly they're all screaming, "WTF I have this sweet ORCID ID, why can't your platform support ORCID?" Now the editors of that journal are going to remember ORCID and take it into consideration when they re-up their contracts with Elsevier (or jump ship). So of course Elsevier needs to support ORCID. Then more journals adopt it. And around the circle we go. Those seeds are already being planted, and are going to drive up ORCID usage in a very organic and unassuming way. That's why I say it's sneaky. Not because they have a profit incentive, but because of the indirect means by which I think they're going to grow. It's a very different approach from academia.edu even though they're in the same general domain.
      - afandian 13y ago
        Sure, I think that's what will happen. But I don't think there's any other way of doing it. ORCID is solving the problem of identifying and crediting individual academics, not necessarily because the academics are frustrated (as, I think, is the motivation behind academia.edu) but for practical metadata reasons. For sure lots of publishers are going to start saying 'do you have an ORCID?' and vice versa. I think the alternative is lots of publishers each saying 'could you log in to our custom identity service'. Around the circle we go, as you say. But what's wrong with that? It's all in the open, it's all documented, it's all (as far as I can tell) open source. And it's OAuth2 FWIW. For the record, here's the list of members: http://orcid.org/about/community/members http://orcid.org/about/community/members and sponsors: http://orcid.org/about/community/sponsors http://orcid.org/about/community/sponsors
j_m_b 13y ago
This is the first I have seen of academia.edu. Everyone I know are on researchgate.net. First comment was about orcid.org, another site I just found out about. Talk about market saturation and social network fragmentation!
- guynamedloren 13y ago
  Very, very fragmented. I'm building something that is in some ways competing with Academia.edu, and I didn't even discover them until I was deep into the market research. But maybe I'm just a crappy researcher :)
- zby 13y ago
  In 2010 I worked for http://philpapers.org/ http://philpapers.org/ - this one is limited to philosophy.
schimmy_changa 13y ago
I can't see how this is a "radical new idea". It's a good idea and very valuable if executed correctly, but taking an existing, proved model (aka facebook) and tweaking it to work for academics is not new and hardly radical. I'm not hating on the idea, I love more tools for academia, but the title is hyperbole.
- 21echoes 13y ago
  i thought the same thing at first, having just read the title, but it seems it's really not about the "social network" part at all. this is more like arXiv.org in that it's a platform for academics to publish their own research papers.
  - gjuggler 13y ago
    Have you tried actually logging in? This is not quite arxiv.org — I'd estimate that 90% of the engineering going into academia.edu has gone towards features on par with LinkedIn for their spamminess. I signed up, and was asked about 10 times to connect to Facebook, Gmail, invite my friends, etc. They have some interesting features (such as feeds of recent articles organized by journal you can sign up for), but by far the most important feature of academia.edu is growing academia.edu.
  - robotresearcher 13y ago
    Not publish: share and discover. That's how we network. Having said that, I haven't found Academia.edu useful. I like Google Scholar better, and that has plenty of problems.
- r00fus 13y ago
  It's probably not a new idea. Neither was Facebook. 99% perspiration and all that. Personally, I wish him well. I think academic journals are a very worthy target of disruption.
srgseg 13y ago
It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide Looks like they're hitting critical mass. I love the idea that this is liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers that our taxes are paying for. I'm also delighted that Khosla Ventures are giving this room to breathe. "Khosla does appear to be increasingly open to investing in startups that have a social mission and a business model. This is often referred to as 'impact investing'"
- BlackJack 13y ago
  The stat is unclear. I'm a member of the website, but I'm a college student. A Google search shows that there's about 20 million college students in the US alone. I agree that the platform is growing quickly and I wish them the best, but I don't think they have 25% of the world's academics right now.
- mjn 13y ago
  > liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers Annoyingly, you have to register an account and log in to download any papers. The uploader doesn't have any control over this. It's still free, but distinctly worse than arXiv, or heck, even the classic academic homepage with PDFs on it, both of which already exist. I would guess this also inflates their membership count, which is, I assume, the reason for the requirement. I myself never use academia.edu when I can help it, but I have an account because I must sometimes log in when someone has chosen to host their paper there instead of somewhere better.
  - zissou 13y ago
    Although not primarily in the discovery space, if you're a user of arXiv, you may be interested in the n-gram viewer our lab made: http://arxiv.culturomics.org http://arxiv.culturomics.org
- afandian 13y ago
  Every published paper (the Version of Record) gets a DOI. Most for-profit publishers paywall access to these. In order to 'do academia' you must cite using the DOI, which points only to the Version of Record. It's great to see papers published in the open (I assume this is the Personal Version of papers), but in order to participate in the academic process, you have to cite the Version of Record. As I understand it (I'm new to the industry) publishers are starting to realise that if they don't provide free access to government funded papers then their revenue streams will dry up.
philip1209 13y ago
How does one obtain a .edu domain name?
- mjn 13y ago
  Either you have to be a legitimate academic institution, or you aren't, but are grandfathered in because you acquired the domain before 2001. This case is #2.
frabbit 13y ago
I don't know whether it's Rao's write-up or not but this sounds like absolute rubbish written by yet another "business management" "consultant". Is Hacker News about hacking or about lame web-2.0 bubble business bullshit?
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  About 20% hacking, 80% bbb. But I find so many gems in that 20% it's still one of the best single sources on the net for hacking.
memracom 13y ago
Sorry to say that I almost fell off my chair to see a claim that a social network for academia is a radical new idea. This is an old established idea that has been with us for over 150 years. Academia is one of the most successful social networks ever. Sure, there are changes in how it functions but I wouldn't call that radical. Academics were the early adopters of the Internet, creating thousands of mailing lists before the web came along. I read lots of academic papers and I find them in two ways. One, is that I google for them. And the second is by following up references in papers to find a particular author's web page where they usually have lots of info about their work including a complete list of papers that they have published. Often these are very old school web pages that were started circa 1992 or so. The WWW only went public in 1990. Ever since academia moved onto the Internet in around 1990, they have been innovating with bibliographic servers that go far beyond a web search engine. It is nice to see some more incremental improvements but the hype about it being radical and new does more harm than help.
dobbsbob 13y ago
This places some of our greatest resources into a closed box not available to the general public.
shaohua 13y ago
April fool?
jlebrech 13y ago
I thought that was how facebook started

41 points by RichardPrice 13y ago

afandian 13y ago

Worth mentioning Orcid.org. Solves broadly the same problem. No need to get profit involved.

smokinn 13y ago
One of the problems with for-profit is that the company is likely to sell its community out if they think that'll make them more money. See: Elsevier buying Mendeley and the backlash from that: http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/apr/10/elsevier-buys-mendeley-academic-reaction http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/201... This Onion talk put it really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_m6U1f9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_...
- X4 13y ago
  @smokinn thank you for the great video! I didn't know that the onion had such quality talks. I personally use Mendeley, but only to obtain other people's Papers and sync my Bibtex fies. @afandian NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia. Generally speaking, I really don't get what's good about those platforms. Can anyone try to explain why people keep using it for another thing than peer-pressure?? I mean you upload a damn pdf with some meta-data attached to it. What's so hard? Use XMPP/IRC or Usenet for the communication and you're set, I must be dumb. I don't see why there is a need for those "new social networks". When email/mailing-lists/irc/xmpp/usenet/forums etc. already exist.
  - gjuggler 13y ago
    A large chunk of ORCID actually is open source: https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source (though I don't necessarily agree that it should be, since ORCID is not a library or tool, but rather a service that only has real value if there's a single instance in existence). I think there's a misunderstanding here on what ORCID is exactly. The name is an acronym for "Open Researcher and Contributor ID." It has nothing to do with publishing, but rather is being built as a central arbiter of academic identity. Academics love to measure their importance by the papers they've authored or co-authored. Most databases currently track the names of authors associated with each published paper. But names are frustratingly ambiguous or degenerate, which makes it difficult to do things like create an auto-updated list of all the papers you've published. ORCID is a publisher-funded non profit designed to reduce ambiguity in author identification, by simply assigning a UUID to every researcher. This is a case of publishers agreeing that collaboratively funding a single, centralized technical solution will benefit everyone much more than having a bunch of competing, siloed systems.
  - afandian 13y ago
    Sorry I didn't understand your comment "NOT OPENSOURCE! Not worth it for academia". Could you clarify?
    - X4 13y ago
      Not worth it for academia means, that academia deserves something better than a vendor lock-in, by some closed-source software. It deserves a medium that doesn't stand in it's way, but empowers students/professors, scientists and other people, instead of depowering them by centralizing all power to one login provider. Academia is about innovation and sharing knowledge. A gatekeeper or a closed-source platform inevitably creates a bottleneck that slows innovation and knowledge sharing down. Furthermore, a social network as Academia requires a medium that adapts to it's need, not the other way around, therefore an optimal solution can only be opensource.
verisimilidude 13y ago
ORCID is sneaky in the way it's integrating itself into existing publisher workflows so seamlessly. All the vendors up and down the traditional academic publishing food chain seem to be racing to support it.
- afandian 13y ago
  ORCID is non-profit. There are some organisations, such as ORCID, who exist for the purpose of facilitating the academic publishing 'industry' rather than making money out of it. Sometimes a businessperson spots an opportunity and exploits it. Sometimes people who all have a common problem get together and try to solve it.
  - verisimilidude 13y ago
    Uh, yes. Maybe I should clarify my own point. I suspect we're going to see ORCID explode in usage and popularity over the next few years. And I don't think that's going to be driven by authors, at first. It's going to be driven by the publishers. This is going to be possible because of how well ORCID integrates with the current world of online academic publishing. So imagine in a year or two, a journal like Nature hypothetically says, "We have this cool feature now called ORCID, and all authors submitting manuscripts MUST provide an ORCID ID. You'll love it, we swear." Then the same authors try to get another paper published, maybe in an Elsevier journal, and suddenly they're all screaming, "WTF I have this sweet ORCID ID, why can't your platform support ORCID?" Now the editors of that journal are going to remember ORCID and take it into consideration when they re-up their contracts with Elsevier (or jump ship). So of course Elsevier needs to support ORCID. Then more journals adopt it. And around the circle we go. Those seeds are already being planted, and are going to drive up ORCID usage in a very organic and unassuming way. That's why I say it's sneaky. Not because they have a profit incentive, but because of the indirect means by which I think they're going to grow. It's a very different approach from academia.edu even though they're in the same general domain.
    - afandian 13y ago
      Sure, I think that's what will happen. But I don't think there's any other way of doing it. ORCID is solving the problem of identifying and crediting individual academics, not necessarily because the academics are frustrated (as, I think, is the motivation behind academia.edu) but for practical metadata reasons. For sure lots of publishers are going to start saying 'do you have an ORCID?' and vice versa. I think the alternative is lots of publishers each saying 'could you log in to our custom identity service'. Around the circle we go, as you say. But what's wrong with that? It's all in the open, it's all documented, it's all (as far as I can tell) open source. And it's OAuth2 FWIW. For the record, here's the list of members: http://orcid.org/about/community/members http://orcid.org/about/community/members and sponsors: http://orcid.org/about/community/sponsors http://orcid.org/about/community/sponsors

j_m_b 13y ago

This is the first I have seen of academia.edu. Everyone I know are on researchgate.net. First comment was about orcid.org, another site I just found out about. Talk about market saturation and social network fragmentation!

guynamedloren 13y ago
Very, very fragmented. I'm building something that is in some ways competing with Academia.edu, and I didn't even discover them until I was deep into the market research. But maybe I'm just a crappy researcher :)
zby 13y ago
In 2010 I worked for http://philpapers.org/ http://philpapers.org/ - this one is limited to philosophy.

schimmy_changa 13y ago

I can't see how this is a "radical new idea". It's a good idea and very valuable if executed correctly, but taking an existing, proved model (aka facebook) and tweaking it to work for academics is not new and hardly radical. I'm not hating on the idea, I love more tools for academia, but the title is hyperbole.

21echoes 13y ago
i thought the same thing at first, having just read the title, but it seems it's really not about the "social network" part at all. this is more like arXiv.org in that it's a platform for academics to publish their own research papers.
- gjuggler 13y ago
  Have you tried actually logging in? This is not quite arxiv.org — I'd estimate that 90% of the engineering going into academia.edu has gone towards features on par with LinkedIn for their spamminess. I signed up, and was asked about 10 times to connect to Facebook, Gmail, invite my friends, etc. They have some interesting features (such as feeds of recent articles organized by journal you can sign up for), but by far the most important feature of academia.edu is growing academia.edu.
- robotresearcher 13y ago
  Not publish: share and discover. That's how we network. Having said that, I haven't found Academia.edu useful. I like Google Scholar better, and that has plenty of problems.
r00fus 13y ago
It's probably not a new idea. Neither was Facebook. 99% perspiration and all that. Personally, I wish him well. I think academic journals are a very worthy target of disruption.

srgseg 13y ago

It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide Looks like they're hitting critical mass. I love the idea that this is liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers that our taxes are paying for. I'm also delighted that Khosla Ventures are giving this room to breathe. "Khosla does appear to be increasingly open to investing in startups that have a social mission and a business model. This is often referred to as 'impact investing'"

BlackJack 13y ago
The stat is unclear. I'm a member of the website, but I'm a college student. A Google search shows that there's about 20 million college students in the US alone. I agree that the platform is growing quickly and I wish them the best, but I don't think they have 25% of the world's academics right now.
mjn 13y ago
> liberating and making easily discoverable the world's academic papers Annoyingly, you have to register an account and log in to download any papers. The uploader doesn't have any control over this. It's still free, but distinctly worse than arXiv, or heck, even the classic academic homepage with PDFs on it, both of which already exist. I would guess this also inflates their membership count, which is, I assume, the reason for the requirement. I myself never use academia.edu when I can help it, but I have an account because I must sometimes log in when someone has chosen to host their paper there instead of somewhere better.
- zissou 13y ago
  Although not primarily in the discovery space, if you're a user of arXiv, you may be interested in the n-gram viewer our lab made: http://arxiv.culturomics.org http://arxiv.culturomics.org
afandian 13y ago
Every published paper (the Version of Record) gets a DOI. Most for-profit publishers paywall access to these. In order to 'do academia' you must cite using the DOI, which points only to the Version of Record. It's great to see papers published in the open (I assume this is the Personal Version of papers), but in order to participate in the academic process, you have to cite the Version of Record. As I understand it (I'm new to the industry) publishers are starting to realise that if they don't provide free access to government funded papers then their revenue streams will dry up.

philip1209 13y ago

How does one obtain a .edu domain name?

mjn 13y ago
Either you have to be a legitimate academic institution, or you aren't, but are grandfathered in because you acquired the domain before 2001. This case is #2.

frabbit 13y ago

I don't know whether it's Rao's write-up or not but this sounds like absolute rubbish written by yet another "business management" "consultant". Is Hacker News about hacking or about lame web-2.0 bubble business bullshit?

SkyMarshal 13y ago
About 20% hacking, 80% bbb. But I find so many gems in that 20% it's still one of the best single sources on the net for hacking.

memracom 13y ago

Sorry to say that I almost fell off my chair to see a claim that a social network for academia is a radical new idea. This is an old established idea that has been with us for over 150 years. Academia is one of the most successful social networks ever. Sure, there are changes in how it functions but I wouldn't call that radical. Academics were the early adopters of the Internet, creating thousands of mailing lists before the web came along. I read lots of academic papers and I find them in two ways. One, is that I google for them. And the second is by following up references in papers to find a particular author's web page where they usually have lots of info about their work including a complete list of papers that they have published. Often these are very old school web pages that were started circa 1992 or so. The WWW only went public in 1990. Ever since academia moved onto the Internet in around 1990, they have been innovating with bibliographic servers that go far beyond a web search engine. It is nice to see some more incremental improvements but the hype about it being radical and new does more harm than help.

dobbsbob 13y ago

This places some of our greatest resources into a closed box not available to the general public.

shaohua 13y ago

April fool?

jlebrech 13y ago

I thought that was how facebook started