> it also does very well in Google search results<p>Indeed. When in grad school (in Math) I googled my best friend's name (a fellow grad student) and the academia.edu page turned out to be the second hit. Turned out that they had scraped his professional website, as well as pretty much everyone else's, and created a mediocre copy.<p>There was a tempting link at the bottom: "Are you [X]"? In a frivolous mood, I claimed that indeed I was. I was asked for no verification whatsoever -- but I was asked to set a password. I changed my friend's profile to "I'm pretty much a putz who sits around and plays bridge all day", and it stayed that way near the top of Google's search results for some time.<p>I might have felt guilty, but honestly I got the overwhelming position that nobody could possibly take them seriously, they were just an SEO farm with no content.<p>That link is gone now, and the site looks much more professional. I searched for people I know... and people I know <i>are</i> using it! (I confess to being surprised.)<p>The front page is a bit ambiguous. "Share your papers" solves a problem no academic has. But getting notifications when anyone from a list of people I know shares a paper would be genuinely useful.<p>I'm not creating an account just yet, and my cynical instinct tells me that in the long run this will prove to be more trouble for academics to use than they find it worth. In any case they face the chicken-and-egg problem. But, this site looks more useful than I had (ten minutes ago) imagined any such site could be.
Google Scholar last week (soft?)-launched personal pages that seem have much more comprehensive coverage of the literature and accurate automatic attribution of authorship.<p>I'm not sure what to think yet, but this general space (including the citation/paper archiving tools) is getting incredibly crowded. There's not really a problem finding anyone's homepage (which I have much greater faith will be kept free and available). And despite the evil publishers, if you're affiliated with a university, there's no problem accessing papers. The only hard part is deciding what to spend time reading.
I just tried it out. Clean design, looks smart and runs fast enough. It found a bunch of my papers.<p>One important thing: I can't find a way to give/get formal references to the papers. This means I can't use any of the papers I find here without googling to find the text (or if I'm lucky, BibTex) of its conventional reference. This is such a glaring omission that I wonder if it was intentional. Does anyone know?<p>Also, scribd rendered PDFs look like hell, and the scribd frame captures scrolling events. If the frame doesn't fit in a browser window (which it doesn't by default) you have to move the pointer in and out of the frame and scroll in both places to read a page of the paper. yuk.
Looks pretty smart, I really hope this project succeeds because as an ex-academic I find it almost impossible to get hold of information about research, and particularly papers.<p>One thing which could be improved though is the lack of canonical departmental names. For example, if you look at the University of Manchester there are entries for 'Classics & Ancient History' and 'Classics and Ancient History', so you have to look at both to see all the members.<p>Localisation would also be good - in the UK we don't tend to refer to people as 'Faculty' or 'Graduate Student' (lecturers see themselves as being tied to a department or school rather than the mostly administrative faculty).
It didn't take me long to find papers which are under the copyright of fee-charging journals, which should not be shared outside the institution they are licensed to - how do you plan to tackle this?