The Story of Academia.edu

The Story of Academia.edu Richard Price May 2020 I grew up in the UK, and became interested in philosophy when I was a teenager. I was interested in questions like: does God exist? Do we have free will? I applied to Oxford to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and got in to St Catherine’s College. I then stayed on to do a Masters in philosophy, and then a PhD (which Oxford calls a “D.Phil”). For most of my PhD, I was at All Souls College, where I was a Prize Fellow. Aside from philosophy, my other passion in life is entrepreneurship. I started four companies alongside my PhD: Richard’s Banana Bakery, which was a cake company selling banana cakes to offices in London; Dashing Lunches, a sandwich company selling sandwiches to offices in London; LiveOut, which was a database of student rental properties in Oxford; and PeopleRadar, which was a photo- rating app on Facebook. 1 Idea The fifth company was Academia.edu. As I was finishing my PhD, I decided I wanted to have a homepage where I could say “this is who I am; this is what I have been working on; here are my papers.” At the time, Oxford offered a few megabytes of space for personal websites, and you had to write your own HTML, and FTP files to the server yourself. I remember thinking “there should be a one-click way of creating a homepage, and uploading papers. Having a homepage shouldn’t require technical ability.” I asked a few of my fellow graduate students, and they felt the same way. We all wanted homepages for a couple of reasons. One was that the journal system is slow: it takes ∼12 months to get a paper published in a journal. The second reason was that the journal system puts papers behind paywalls: it costs $40 on a journal site to download a single paper. Homepages allowed you to get your papers out quickly, and make them available for free. I wrote a long business plan (∼80 pages), traveled to and from London to technology networking events, where I would meet investors, and ask them for introductions. I raised $600,000 from London-based investors, and moved to San Francisco. Ben Lund, a software engineer from the UK, joined a few months later. With a 1 few others, we launched Academia.edu in September 2008. 2 Growth In the early days, what mattered most of all was growth: growth in users and papers uploaded. In the first few months, we were growing at a linear rate. Some days 37 users would join, the next day 42, the next day 38. We made it to 50,000 users a year later, and a friend of mine posted on my Facebook wall “Congratulations; here’s to 500,000 users.” I remember thinking “wow, that is a lot. At a linear rate, that is going to take 10x the amount of time it has taken so far.” We started to figure out exponential growth, and we got to 500,000 users, and then quickly to 1 million users. Today 125 million users have joined Academia.edu, and around 140,000 people join Academia.edu each day. 3 Mission The mission of Academia.edu is to accelerate the world’s research. Our goal is to speed up research in every domain - finding a solution to climate change; finding cures for diseases; evolving artificial intelligence. We want to accelerate research in all these fields, and others too. There are four pillars to Academia’s mission. 3.1 Open Access The first pillar of the mission is open access. Academia’s goal is to ensure that every paper, ever written, is on the internet, available for free. 22 million papers have been uploaded to Academia.edu. We think there are ∼100 million papers ever written, so we are ∼20% of the way there. 3.2 Distribution The second pillar of the mission is distribution. Academia’s goal is to build the fastest and most relevant paper distribution system in the world. Today Academia.edu’s algorithms make about 20 million paper recommenda- tions a day. 3.3 Peer Review The third pillar of the mission is peer review. Academia’s goal is to provide signals regarding the trustworthiness of papers, and the trustworthiness of in- dividual claims within papers, on Academia.edu. Over 65 million people visit Academia.edu each month. Most of them are not experts in the areas of the papers that they are reading. They might read a 2 sentence such as “Hydroxychloroquine has been shown to help patients suffering from Covid-19”. They may wonder to themselves “What do people in the field think about this claim?” At the paper level, we have a system called PaperRank. A paper can be recommended by one of Academia.edu’s ∼20,000 editors. A paper’s PaperRank is a function of how many recommendations it has received, weighted by how well recommended the recommender is. In the future, we want to build more peer review tools, particularly in the area of allowing people to understand expert consensus around individual claims. 3.4 Formats The fourth pillar of the mission is formats. Academia’s goal is to enable the sharing of knowledge in a variety of formats. There are instances of knowledge such as data, and code, that don’t fit into the traditional PDF format. There are formats such as video, which some people prefer for learning. Not everyone has two hours to read a 10,000 word PDF. Some people want a compressed version of the key ideas. Academia recently launched a feature called ”Summaries”. We trained a ma- chine learning algorithm on our corpus of 23 million papers, and now summaries of ∼700 words in length are available for any paper on Academia.edu. In the future, we would like to enable the sharing of other formats such as data-sets, code, video, and other kinds of textual formats. 4 Plan The plan for Academia is to build these pillars in steps. 1. Build an open access platform. 2. Build a distribution system. 3. Build a peer review system. 4. Build a system for sharing new formats. We have built an open access platform (step 1). We are currently on step 2 of Academia’s plan: building a distribution system. 5 Guiding Philosophy Our guiding philosophy is that people want: • Research to be free • Research that is relevant to be sent to them 3  • Signals that help them evaluate the truth/falsity of what they are reading • Research to be presented in the right format, for easy comprehension Academia.edu’s goal is to make that vision a reality. The end result is: • Research is accelerated: research towards solving the world’s problems is accelerated. • Research is democratized: everyone has access to it. 6 Business Model Academia’s business model is a premium subscription service. People can pay $100 a year to upgrade to a premium account. This includes features such as: • Mentions (knowing who is mentioning you) • Bulk Download (being able to download lots of PDFs at once) • Advanced Search (searching the full-text of papers on Academia.edu) • Summaries (the summaries product mentioned above) • Grants (accessing a database of grants on Academia.edu) • and other features. 225,000 people have become Premium subscribers. The company is prof- itable. The company has 53 people, most of whom are software engineers, product managers and designers. Everyone is based in San Francisco. 7 The Surprising Reach of Academic Research The most surprising thing I have learned, since starting Academia.edu, is how large the interest in academic research is from beyond the academic world. Academia.edu has over 65 million visitors each month. By our calculation, there are about 17 million academics in the world (graduate students and faculty). A reasonable fraction of academics visit Academia each month, but approxi- mately 85% of Academia.edu’s monthly visitors are not academics. They are professionals: lawyers, engineers, teachers, nurses, architects. Every profession is represented. When downloading a paper, someone can explain what sparked their interest in the paper. We call these “reasons for downloading”. Here are a few reasons for downloading from professionals. These reasons speak to the way in which research is brought into the work-place: 4  A chemical engineer from the U.S. wrote “I was viewing this article in an attempt to better model the crystallization reactor for a phosphoric acid pro- duction plant. I’m particularly trying to find operating temperatures and pres- sures.” A farmer in Africa, downloading a paper on water conservation, wrote “I farm in the Sahara desert so conserving water is important to me, and I want to find out more about how to re-use our limited water to feed myself and my animals.” A teacher downloaded a paper called ”The Pen is Mightier than the Key- board”, and wrote as their reason for downloading ”The kids I teach are in a K-8 school. The school says pencils will be banned next year. I am looking for research to change that decision.” 8 The Beginning We have begun the project of making research open; distributed; verified; and available in new formats. I am proud of what Academia.edu has achieved so far. Most of the work lies in the future, and I find that inspiring. 5