[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.