Sorry to say that I almost fell off my chair to see a claim that a social network for academia is a radical new idea. This is an old established idea that has been with us for over 150 years. Academia is one of the most successful social networks ever. Sure, there are changes in how it functions but I wouldn't call that radical. Academics were the early adopters of the Internet, creating thousands of mailing lists before the web came along.<p>I read lots of academic papers and I find them in two ways. One, is that I google for them. And the second is by following up references in papers to find a particular author's web page where they usually have lots of info about their work including a complete list of papers that they have published. Often these are very old school web pages that were started circa 1992 or so. The WWW only went public in 1990.<p>Ever since academia moved onto the Internet in around 1990, they have been innovating with bibliographic servers that go far beyond a web search engine. It is nice to see some more incremental improvements but the hype about it being radical and new does more harm than help.