It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide
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'"
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.
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.
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.
That statistic looks spurious to me. Around 20% of my academia.edu contacts are 'independent researchers'. I'm not a heavy user of the site, and I pay little attention to it.
I can tell you from experience that getting buy in from mid to senior academics for this kind of thing is really tough as it doesn't add value to what they do in pre-existing ways already. The current bureaucratic cost cutting environment in universities doesn't help either.
The real question is, how many active weekly users does Academia.edu have?
Let freedom ring!
Personally, I wish him well. I think academic journals are a very worthy target of disruption.
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.
Having said that, I haven't found Academia.edu useful. I like Google Scholar better, and that has plenty of problems.
This Onion talk put it really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8c_...
@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.
Sometimes a businessperson spots an opportunity and exploits it. Sometimes people who all have a common problem get together and try to solve it.
Is Hacker News about hacking or about lame web-2.0 bubble business bullshit?
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.