So, is anybody here actually active on academia.edu? Asking, since as a computer vision researcher (3D reconstruction, obstacle recognition/identification, augmented reality, ...) I am constantly looking for scientific resources, and to be frank, it is quite annoying because it can become really time consuming.
So a genuine question, is the site worth signing up for? I remember when mendeley just started, there was lots of excitement about it, mainly because it was sort of marketed as the last.fm of research (giving you good recommendations for your scientific interests), but then it turned out to be just meeh (getting bought by Elsevier didn't help much ;-).
Also, on a side note, are there any other good sites doing something similar out there (like a reddit/HN for insert your research interests here type of site) that are actually any good? I'm sure there must be a lot of other researchers active on HN...
I've been a regular user of Mendeley, not for recommendations--that's what journal TOC alert services are for--but just for managing my bibliographies and preprint PDFs. I'm allergic to Endnote and I got tired of Zotero's sluggish speed (not that I've tried using it in a few years). Mendeley has been a nice replacement.
(All that said, I really do hope Zotero does well, since it's open-source and not owned by a major commercial publisher.)
We're trying to build a social learning network for science that aims to provide a good discussion, learning and networking environment. Here's the link - http://functionspace.org
The major use of the site is that you can follow researchers who interest you and be notified when they upload new papers (and likewise allow people to follow you) - the notifications for Google Scholar are not terribly useful for that.
It's all fun and games until we someone asks what's the DAU/MAU on that puppy. How many of those are actually active and what are they actually doing when they login.
That was my first thought. Educause is pretty strict about .edu domains. I was working IT at a (legitimate, accredited, state-run) school that renamed itself and we only had a short window (6mo before & after, IIRC) that we were allowed to operate both domains, after which they pulled the plug on the old one.
after Mendeley I'm not going anywhere near something like this. and seriously, isn't the web itself the best publishing mechanism ever invented? why are we trying to fit everything into a single service provider model? academic makes webpage using awful html and notepad with copies of their articles. other researchers track the people they're interested in. RSS? not my !@##@ problem, use a site checker plug-in. it's free, extendable and has no lock-in risks. the root cause problem here is academic promotion incentives almost force you into publishing behind paywalls.
Academics on the whole are not a good demo for advertising and don't want to pay for anything related to their jobs/research unless they have absolutely no other choice. How are they going to make money? I can't even see them being a good acquisition.
I'd love to see their business plan, too. As of now, since they don't charge anything, you have to assume that the users are the product.
From what I can make of the publicly available information (mostly interviews with Richard), AE's primary business model is to spot research trends early and then sell this information to customers (e.g., industry, governments, etc.). One seemingly simple example of this would be to identify trends in drug/medical research and sell it to the large pharmaceutical companies. Anyone who has worked in academics knows that the lag between when research is done and when it is published is substantial (months to years). A drug company getting 12 month research head start on the competition would be huge. I can only imagine that this carries over to a large number of other fields (economics, aeronautics, finance, any field related to energy, etc.).
CHARGING FOR DATA
A few other ideas about how they could charge institutions for data (the current job board doesn't seem to be very data-driven):
- Information about trending majors and research areas so that the number and type of faculty matches at a research school matches the market demand (e.g., of research journals, grants, students, etc.).
- Headhunter info for schools looking to recruit promising young academics as either students or professors. Elite schools would likely pay big money to find the multitude of really smart, really talented, and really motivated students who just never think of going to an elite school (there are A LOT of them). Additionally, some extremely capable grad students get lost in the tenure track professor mix because they didn't attend a name/feeder school (for whatever reason).
- Honeypot for Big Bro.
OTHER THINGS TO CHARGE FOR
A few things AE and their competitors could probably charge for (note that I think that grad students are a much larger market than their professors):
- Marketplace for editing.
- Autogenerated lists of "interesting" articles/books based on user input (e.g., articles the user likes, keyword analysis of a draft of a paper, etc.). The tech and algo concepts exist to do this, but I think the people how can do it have bigger fish to fry.
- EndNote competitor that works really well. All the pieces for a (near-)perfect product are out there, but no one has really put them together in one place.
- Repos for grad student work and papers and/or for research teams. There is a lot of potential here, many of which I would have loved to have on both the student and professor ends:
a) tracking student research progress (e.g., data collection commits, draft commits, etc.)
b) collaborative resource development and/or sharing (e.g., data sets, citation lists, etc.)
c) peer review (both inside and outside of a student's school and department)
d) aggregated publication outlets for stance pieces or small exploratory studies that rarely get published but often provide valuable insights
e) a variety of writing models for other students to learn from
FOR THE GOOD OF ACADEMICS
A few things that they could reach to do for the good of academics but probably won't due to minimal profit potential:
- Facilitate the development of a large number of online journals with decent standards. All of the pieces are there on a site like AE, but there needs to be a ringleader or evangelist. This proliferation of peer reviewed publications with a decent level of standards would remove a lot of the politics from academic publishing and would let the market of ideas determine which research is most important.
- Connecting researchers (both students and academics) with similar research interests. You would think the internet would make this easy, but my personal experiences and the experiences I have witnessed of others suggests otherwise.
- Tracking and teaching people about their intellectual heritage -- for example, what are the branches of Whiteheadian philosophy, which branch are you in, and how does your branch compare and contrast with other branches.
Richard is a smart guy, and I wouldn't be too quick to bet against him. While AE isn't the most pleasant site to use in its current state, I think there is a lot of potential for something great to happen. I look forward to hearing more about AE's journey to bring that greatness to be.
IMO the only useful thing about A.edu is that they have a good position in search engines and give you an information about clicks -- so it's like Google Analytics for your papers and profile. The rest is sadly either cumbersome or redundant.
So a genuine question, is the site worth signing up for? I remember when mendeley just started, there was lots of excitement about it, mainly because it was sort of marketed as the last.fm of research (giving you good recommendations for your scientific interests), but then it turned out to be just meeh (getting bought by Elsevier didn't help much ;-).
Also, on a side note, are there any other good sites doing something similar out there (like a reddit/HN for insert your research interests here type of site) that are actually any good? I'm sure there must be a lot of other researchers active on HN...