[RichardPrice]

Hi, I'm the founder of Academia.edu.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- Readers tells you who is reading your papers

- Mentions alerts you when papers are uploaded mentioning your name

- Expanded Analytics provides a more detailed look at what kinds of people visit your profile and how people find your papers

- Advanced Search allows you to find exact keyword matches in the full text of every paper on Academia

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.

We are grateful to all the academics who have contributed to Academia, and we will continue to serve academics from around the world.

[danra]

> Academia’s mission is to get every academic paper ever written on the internet, available for free

> In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided that features related to the mission of the company should be free

That's absurd. Open access to an ocean of articles without the ability to search through them is meaningless.

While you do allow search in titles, thus providing some ability to locate relevant material, presenting content search as some premium feature in 2017 is ridiculous.

[impendia]

> Open access to an ocean of articles without the ability to search through them is meaningless.

As an academic mathematician, I disagree. The ability to search through articles' content is great, but being able to access an article given its authors and title would already be quite valuable.

I hope that academic researchers eventually converge on a completely open-access model, involving commercial enterprises to the minimum extent possible.

But researchers are too preoccupied with other things to make this a priority. For the moment, I am happy to see anyone taking on entrenched interests (e.g. Elsevier), from whatever angle. The status quo is bad enough that I welcome "creative disruption" of essentially any sort.

[crawfordcomeaux]

There are network effects this search limitation creates over time. We can probably even predict some of them. Here are a couple of superficial guesses:

- less creative titles

- longer titles to cram keywords in (ie. an academic form of clickbait)

The point is artificial limitations will produce unknown effects on the system being limited. Offering premium search is an uninspired approach that will have an unpredictable impact should Academia.edu become the status quo.

I'm neither condemning nor condoning premium search. Merely warning against accepting arbitrary limitations simply because it's better than what you've currently got.

[impendia]

I believe that you're overestimating Academia.edu's potential influence.

The whole reason that Elsevier et al. can make so much money is that researchers can keep doing exactly what they have always been doing. Researchers themselves don't see the publishers' invoices, let alone pay them, and they are under essentially no pressure to cut costs. In particular, Elsevier has no influence whatsoever in academia -- they just make shitloads of money.

Managing academics is often compared to "herding cats"; it is uncommon for academics to be very willing to realign themselves according to external factors. (Exception: grant funding agencies.) Anyone trying to make money in this industry should keep this in mind.

[__s]

These are consequences, but the disagreement here seems to be whether a search feature is necessary at all. The user you responded to seems to find it useful enough if I can be directed to a paper by some contact, & then be free to look up the references of the paper

[anigbrowl]

That's an absurd argument. Of course being able to search titles is better than not being able to search at all, but card-catalog search is 25 years behind the norm that people are used to. This is the equivalent of 'eat your peas, some people get no food at all' and it's dismissive of rather than responsive to the problem.

[jasonlotito]

> That's absurd. Open access to an ocean of articles without the ability to search through them is meaningless.

I'm pretty sure this statement is debunked by the fact that this feature is a new feature and didn't exist before for the site, unless you are suggesting that prior to this, Academia has always been meaningless.

[anigbrowl]

Stop being so literalist. The poster above is making the valid point that now that we're used to being able to do full-text searches nobody in their right mind wants to invest much effort in using a search engine where that facility isn't available, it's the new normal.

It's a solved problem in technical terms so the only question worth asking is what resources are needed to implement it.

[jasonlotito]

> Stop being so literalist.

No. It was a piss-poor statement that deserved to be called out.

> we're used to being able to do full-text searches

Incorrect. This is a new feature on an existing site. The users of that site were not used to doing full-text searches on that site.

> the only question worth asking is what resources are needed to implement it.

Money, because doing this and doing it right costs money. And they need to get money somewhere. So they can do what Google does, and that is sell advertising. Or they can do something else, and charge for the feature.

But not, you say it's a solved problem, and you claim it can be done for free. So put up. Let's see this free PDF search solution that will scale to their needs.

C'mon, I'm waiting.

[RichardPrice]

It's worth noting that advanced search is a relatively new feature, developed for the premium account. The majority of discovery on Academia happens via social mechanisms on the site: seeing what people you follow are uploading/sharing/commenting on/recommending.

Even though advanced search was requested quite a bit by our users during our research around what features to build for our premium account, other premium features have been more heavily used than advanced search. The social mechanisms have remained the primary way that people discover research on Academia.

[JulienSchmidt]

I really appreciate your efforts. One of the most frustrating things to encounter as a student doing research is a pay-wall.

Regardless if such kind of search was available before or not, many people, like the author of the linked article, will encounter this pay-wall during their research. I think you could benefit, and especially grow, a lot if academia.edu becomes a place where students actually start their research instead of landing there through an external search engine.

In 2017 fulltext search should be considered a basic feature, which according to your business model should be free. Even the online library of my university offers it, even though on a much smaller data set.

If it is true that other premium features are more heavily used than "advanced" search, then you still have enough reasons to legitimate your premium accounts without it.

I think you could find other ways to generate income and become sustainable. For academia.edu it might be premium accounts offering additional services and maybe sponsored content like placed search results, job offers etc. Use the information you generate (but please don't just sell it to a 3rd party).

[ComodoHacker]

It's like an ISP blocking all search engines and charging additional fee for access to them. While you can download and upload resources by URL, I don't think it counts as free access to the Web.

[DenisM]

Is it really meaningless?

[DannyBee]

"In considering what features to offer in the Premium account, we decided that features related to the mission of the company should be free."

And what happens when your decision/view changes because of the inability to make profit or enough profit?

Somehow i doubt the bylaws of the company say you won't ever make that stuff for-pay as well.

[jccalhoun]

How did you get the .edu domain?

[clamprecht]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia.edu#Domain_name

"Academia.edu is not a university or institution for higher learning and so under current standards it would not qualify for the '.edu' top-level domain. However, the domain name 'Academia.edu' was registered in 1999, prior to the regulations requiring .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions. All .edu domain names registered prior to 2001 were grandfathered in, even if not an accredited post-secondary institution."

[jccalhoun]

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell neither of the links that wikipedia links to actually contains the 1999 date and if academia.edu was founded in 2008 then that was after the rules for transfer of a .edu domain were tightened. So there is some real detail missing from how they got the domain name.

[dcow]

There is no limit on the transfer of such grandfathered domains.

[bnj]

I work in a public high school and this restriction on .edu is a source of frustration for me- the US-based and post-secondary restrictions on .edu domains are terrible.

[f_allwein]

from a comment by count in different thread on this page:

"They didn't buy it before the rules were put in place. They launched in 2008 as a company, and the the .edu was restricted to accredited institutions in 2001."

[anigbrowl]

That sounds great. Why don't you make the financials public so people can see what it costs to run a site like this and organize around that problem?

[nyolfen]

sci-hub can give me title search for free and you cant? come on man

[Mediterraneo10]

Sci-hub title search has never actually worked for me. I generally have to look up the DOI for the article from its title at some other site, and then search on sci-hub with the DOI.

[w1ntermute]

There's no need for search at all - when you find the article on its regular site, just edit the domain to end with '.sci-hub.io'

For example, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6121/819 becomes http://science.sciencemag.org.sci-hub.io/content/339/6121/81...