The end of Academia.edu: How business takes over

Hi, I&#x27;m Ben, CTO of Academia.<p>Everyone who works at Academia would love it if we were able to make advanced search free.<p>When we first decided to build a premium account, we also made the decision to not take anything out of the free account. Strange as it may seem, the free account never had full-text search because we couldn&#x27;t justify the cost of building it (full-text search of 20MM PDFs at our traffic levels is expensive to operate). We built it for the premium account because people asked for it in our initial research - and we would love to be able to eventually move it into the free account.<p>On the team we all agree that we want to keep building premium features in order to make the platform sustainable. The author of this article takes the view that advanced search is not a feature that should be paid-for. My view is that we intend keep building features until we have something that is worthy of his support. The support of the academics who use and enjoy the platform, both in free and paid accounts, is what will keep it around and growing for the long term.

I have never liked academia.edu. I always found it pointless. If I want to share my academic work I&#x27;ll put it on my own web site.<p>I also found it weird that they had a .edu address (apparently they bought it before the rules were put in place and so they are grandfathered in)<p>Whenever I searched for a paper and google found an academia.edu link my process was, click on the link, oh crap it wants me to log in, what&#x27;s my password again? fuck it, I&#x27;ll just go to scihub.

Hi, I&#x27;m the founder of Academia.edu.<p>The author of the article objects to the introduction of a freemium model on Academia.edu, and specifically to the idea of advanced search being in the premium set of features.<p>Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the internet, available for free, and to develop a more rigorous and efficient peer review system. Free access to academic research makes the world a more equitable place, and rigorous and efficient peer review accelerates the pace of scientific and scholarly research.<p>Academia launched in 2008, and now around 35 million people use the site a month. Around 19 million papers have been uploaded, and are freely available on the platform. Forty percent of Academia’s users are from developing countries and would otherwise have limited access to academic research.<p>In order to achieve Academia’s goals, Academia is working to become a sustainable operation. In order to do that, we introduced Academia Premium, which includes extra features such as Readers, Mentions, Expanded Analytics and Advanced Search.<p>- Readers tells you who is reading your papers<p>- Mentions alerts you when papers are uploaded mentioning your name<p>- Expanded Analytics provides a more detailed look at what kinds of people visit your profile and how people find your papers<p>- Advanced Search allows you to find exact keyword matches in the full text of every paper on Academia<p>In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided that features related to the mission of the company should be free. This means that features related to open access (free access to uploading and downloading papers), and features related to peer review (sessions, recommendations) are free. As we add new features to Premium, we will continue to ensure that features related to the mission (open access, sessions, recommendations) are free.<p>We are grateful to all the academics who have contributed to Academia, and we will continue to serve academics from around the world.

I stumbled across academia.edu trying to grab a syllabus from some university to find books to supplement my learning.<p>It was so spammy.<p>I didn&#x27;t get why the professor website point all his research towards academia.edu.<p>He could have posted it on his website or github.<p>The website demand from the get go your info and you have to create account to even get stuff. It&#x27;s similar to quora.<p>Quora survived with its quality like posts&#x2F;answers but I still disagree with this type of model.

Academia.edu have the right idea, but their execution sucks.<p>- Signing up is an exercise is spam. Most of the people who are willing to endure the whole thing are the least desirable customers (i.e., folks with more style than substance).<p>- Their onboarding process sucks. Most popular researchers will not jump through the hoops necessary to get their stuff on board. There is no compelling reason to be on there at this point. Within the first 30-60 secs, there is no &quot;hell yeah!&quot; moment.<p>- The issues of what constitutes &quot;previously published&quot; for elite journals is potentially probelmatic (although it shouldn&#x27;t be in this case).<p>- The obvious gift of a research &quot;family tree&quot; has not been offered. Being able to identify distant relatives on this tree has ridiculously high value that has not been manifested.<p>- The recommendation engine sucks. For someone writing a paper on a certain topic, a.e should be able to crank out a fairly accurate list of papers you will want to read or cite before you write. This would be very high value add if done well. A.e whiffed on this one, too.<p>There is a huge need for what a.e is offering or could offer, but their execution has been pretty terrible. It seems like they are optimizing metrics for their funders rather than their customers.<p>If that site does die, I will gladly take it off of their hands, give them 10% equity to leave, and turn it into a ubiquitous resource for academics and researchers.<p>They really need to stop drinking the Bay Area kool aid and figure out what their core customers want... and then deliver that.

How to reproduce:<p>1) log in 2) search your favorite author 3) verify there are zero results in normal search and n&gt;0 in advanced search (as the normal search is on paper titles only) 4) proceed to advanced search, find monthly subscription offer.<p>It doesn&#x27;t feel too good having uploaded some of my articles there, and I hope other similar services (ResearchGate) won&#x27;t do the same.

Perhaps public internet services should really be created in, well, academia and government organizations, like in the old days (think email). At least then we&#x27;ll see some federation, openness of data where useful, and as a bonus, everything will be devoid of ads and user-tracking.

While I fully agree that the academic journal industry is a money extraction racket that needs to be put out of business, I don&#x27;t see how academia.edu was contributing towards that end. The simple solution is for governments to require that the research that they fund be published under a free license of some sort.

Considering how much institutes pay for journal licenses or the $20 - $50 I pay for a single article, I don&#x27;t have much of an issue with $8 a month to find the right article.<p>Not to mention, you can still find articles for free if the keyword is in the title or keyword abstract so the $8 a month isn&#x27;t necessary.<p>That said, I wouldn&#x27;t mind seeing a rev-share model (like old platforms like Squidoo) for popular article authors who are sharing their work for free. With a growing amount of works coming from poorly paid adjuncts, while journals, publishers and institutions continue to rake in huge money, it&#x27;d be good to see some of this flowing back to the researchers who work to support the open access of knowledge.

The author should ask his librarian how much the school pays for access to journals, preferably while seated and not eating anything lest he choke.

Google scholar solves the same problem, for free.<p>HTTPS:&#x2F;&#x2F;Scholar.Google.com

If I go to google now and type in &quot;site:academia.edu Potterheads&quot; I get the 26 papers alluded to in the linked article.

I think 8 euro a month is not a huge price to pay.<p>Open access systems have a hard time getting ongoing funding; arxiv did not have the beginning of a sustainable plan before it was 20 yrs old, and it had near death experiences in the meantime.

The general point is a good one. However, the specific issue the author raises (paid advanced search) is easily avoided with google&#x27;s &quot;site&quot; operator, e.g. &quot;potterheads site:academia.edu&quot;

I refuse to sign up to Academia and ResearchGate, for-profit companies that are littering indexes with pay-wall accessible PDFs that should be available through institutional login, or the author&#x27;s website. And now, through sci-hub.<p>Google scholar paired with sci-hub has become the fastest way to access papers given that institutional subscriptions are scatter gun.<p>1. Find paper on scholar.google.com 2. Find PDF or pay-wall 3. Click the sci-hub bookmarklet<p>If I want to discover papers from my field, I talk to my colleagues. Another wall-garden I do not need.

Looks like the startup is trying different approaches to increase their revenue.<p>Paid monthly subscription and analytics charges to the end user. I guess the author thinks it is the end of the platform, which is possible. I&#x27;m just hesitate to immediately conclude the business is done because of this choice. If the paid upgrades don&#x27;t provide enough value the people won&#x27;t sign up and maybe they will focus on another way. Research Gate is very similar site that sells ad space and for job postings so maybe they will head in that direction.

How does a commercial enterprise even get a .EDU domain? I tried to obtain one for the local private high school, and was told it&#x27;s available only to institutes of higher learning.

Ihave both Academia.edu and Researchgate accounts. For themost part, everyone I know uses it as a kind of cv and repository for preprints of articles published in the usual suspect journals, and not as a replacement for journals.

academia.edu always smelled weird to me. I guess i was right!