Academia.edu Lets Researchers Share Their Raw Data

Why should people put their data here rather than Dryad (<a href="http://www.datadryad.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.datadryad.org/</a>), which assigns DOIs and doesn't require registration to download data sets, and is a non-profit organization, governed by a board including PLoS and Science and powered by completely open source software?

Simply providing the ability to upload data only solves a small part of the problem. We run the CRAWDAD wireless network data archive (<a href="http://crawdad.org/" rel="nofollow">http://crawdad.org/</a>) and the hardest parts are: convincing people to share data; ensuring that the data can be shared (much of the time this is not possible due to consent, data protection, etc); sanitising the data; and finally (and most time-consumingly) creating appropriate metadata so that the data are meaningful to other researchers.<p>The Research Data Alliance (<a href="http://rd-alliance.org/" rel="nofollow">http://rd-alliance.org/</a>) is trying to solve many of these problems.

Graduate student myself: This a cry for business that will fall on deaf ears in academia. Nobody would ever publish half-baked code that 'does the job', for the fear of getting judged. And none of us have time to prettify the code.<p>Academia.edu started with a lot of promise but is frankly a useless placeholder of your name and Email ID now. ResearchGate has surpassed them long ahead in useful features and Mendeley is already very good. They are just making some money from the academic jobs ads and I frankly don't see a future for them if they are happy being almost the exact same product for the past 3 years I have used them.

Another dimension to sharing data-sets along with papers is that papers with data-sets attached get more citations <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000308" rel="nofollow">http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal....</a><p>Readers prefer papers with data-sets attached to them, because you can check the data and see how the conclusions of the paper stand up. That preference may be part of what drives the higher citation rates.

Cool! It is necessary to have second opinions as the recent Excel blooper shows (see <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/24/inside-the-offbeat-economics-department-that-debunked-reinhart-rogoff/" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/24/i...</a>)<p>I heard that <a href="http://bohr.launchrock.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bohr.launchrock.com/</a> is working on something similar.

I ... thought the internet already did that.