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
Comments
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