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'"
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.
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
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.
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.
It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide
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.
I created an account a while back to circumvent Academia.edu's signup wall, not using my full name because I don't actually want an academia.edu page coming up when someone Googles me. I don't think I meant to "follow" Jean-Francois Delvenne of the University of Leeds, but unfortunately for Prof. Delvenne I did and now "this is a nice website for me to poop on" is one of his 37 followers (http://leeds.academia.edu/JeanFrancoisDelvenne/Followers?_pj...). And I'm not even sure this is the only account I made for this purpose.
The real question is, how many active weekly users does Academia.edu have?
Subject to your compliance with the terms and conditions of these Terms, Academia.edu authorizes you to download, view and print any Academia.edu Content, solely for your personal and non-commercial purposes, and to access and use the Site and Services, including to download, view and print any Member Content solely for your personal and non-commercial purposes, and subject to the restrictions set forth in these Terms. You have no right to sublicense the license rights granted in this section.
Comments
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I created an account a while back to circumvent Academia.edu's signup wall, not using my full name because I don't actually want an academia.edu page coming up when someone Googles me. I don't think I meant to "follow" Jean-Francois Delvenne of the University of Leeds, but unfortunately for Prof. Delvenne I did and now "this is a nice website for me to poop on" is one of his 37 followers (http://leeds.academia.edu/JeanFrancoisDelvenne/Followers?_pj...). And I'm not even sure this is the only account I made for this purpose.
The real question is, how many active weekly users does Academia.edu have?
Subject to your compliance with the terms and conditions of these Terms, Academia.edu authorizes you to download, view and print any Academia.edu Content, solely for your personal and non-commercial purposes, and to access and use the Site and Services, including to download, view and print any Member Content solely for your personal and non-commercial purposes, and subject to the restrictions set forth in these Terms. You have no right to sublicense the license rights granted in this section.
Let freedom ring!