[teeboy]

Graduate student myself: This a cry for business that will fall on deaf ears in academia. Nobody would ever publish half-baked code that 'does the job', for the fear of getting judged. And none of us have time to prettify the code.

Academia.edu started with a lot of promise but is frankly a useless placeholder of your name and Email ID now. ResearchGate has surpassed them long ahead in useful features and Mendeley is already very good. They are just making some money from the academic jobs ads and I frankly don't see a future for them if they are happy being almost the exact same product for the past 3 years I have used them.

[RichardPrice]

You're right to focus on rewards. The rewards have to be there for academics to share their data-sets and code. The feedback loop needs to be closed, so that if you share your data, and that data has an impact, that impact is reflected back on you. You can then take that impact and show it to your tenure/grant committee, who can reward you for it. There are a bunch of startups, Academia.edu being one of them, that are very focused on closing that feedback loop.

Mendeley and ResearchGate are both great companies, but if you look at Quantcast/Compete/Alexa, you'll see that Academia.edu is noticeably larger than them in traffic. Academia.edu also has more users. I'm sorry to hear that Academia.edu doesn't satisfy your use-case though....