[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?