Academia.edu is a fast growing social network for researchers around the globe. According to the startup over 90.000 researchers are now joining the network every month with over 800.000 academics signed up in total so far.
The premise of Academia.edu is speed. Publishing a research or paper usually takes months up to years which is very similar to what we know from the book publishing space. With Academia.edu researchers can share their results in real time, speeding up the process of spreading those outcomes with others and therefore accelerating innovation eventually.
Researchers can share their papers, get access to analytics on the views and can of course follow other researchers on the network.
According to TechCrunch researchers are currently uploading 2.500 papers a day which attracts more than 3 million unique visitors per month as those papers are indexed in Google.
Another driver of growth for Academia.edu is the Open Science movement according to the networks founder Richard Price. A growing group of researchers is publishing their papers with open access (similar to open source / creative commons) instead of putting them behind paywalls.
The founding round was led by Spark Capital with participation from True Ventures and brings the total funding of Academia.edu to $6.7 million. If you are an engineer and would like to work for a startup in the research space, Academia.edu is hiring.
