Academia融资450万美元 帮学者分享论文

据国外媒体报道，Academia.edu是面向研究人员的社交网站。2011年它的总注册用户群增长了两倍，达到了80万人，今天它公布了一个可以确保该网站将继续扩张下去的重要新闻：Academia.edu刚刚在Spark Capital牵头的第二轮融资中筹集到了450万美元。该公司曾在2009年年底筹集220万美元，而前一轮的投资者也参加了本轮融资。
你可以把Academia.edu看做是一个学者社交网站，因为它能让学者们彼此联系，关注和他们的研究领域有关的更新，但Academia.edu还有另外一个好处：它给学者们提供了一个发布各自研究结果的有效方式。这比使用个人网站好，因为个人网站的分析工具或搜索引擎优化（SEO）方式有限，而Academia.edu有专门的分析工具，可以让研究人员了解有多少人阅读了他们的文章，而且该网站的文章出现在谷歌搜索结果中的位置也比较靠前。学者们每天上传2500篇文章到Academia.edu，帮助该网站吸引了约300万独立访问者，其中很多人就是通过谷歌搜索找到了该站上的文章。
Academia.edu创始人理查德·普瑞斯（Richard Price）说该网站吸引了越来越多的研究人员，而且它也从各大学和研究所人员最近推动的“开放科学” （Open Science）运动中受益。如果你曾经试图在网上寻找学术论文，你可能会遇到发表这些文章的期刊设置的“收费墙”（paywall，网站为了保护收费内容，只供付费用户浏览而专门设置的付费门槛），阅读这些文章的费用可能不便宜，在某些情况下价格甚至可能贵得很惊人，这使得科研信息零零碎碎，无法自由流动。
最近一些科学家已经开始和这种现象做斗争了，他们让自己的论文变得“开放”，从而让人们可以免费公开访问这些论文。对于想把全部版权都授予一本期刊的研究人员，普林斯顿大学现在要求他们签署弃权文件了；麻省理工学院和哈佛大学也都制定了相应的“开放”政策。很多研究人员都认为，这种“开放”运动将有助于简化研究过程，让他们可以更快地进行创新。
Academia.edu也从这个运动受益，因为研究人员可以免费在这个网站上分享彼此的论文。普瑞斯说Academia.edu目前已经是最大的共享这些研究文章的平台，该公司希望推动这一趋势继续向前发展。

Academia.edu创始人Richard Price：互联网打造科技新未来
每次的技术革新(工业科技、医药)几乎都是从一篇科技论文开始的，而这些技术革新受到两个因素的制约：漫长的论文发表过程以及创新理念传播方式单一化。
　　通常，一篇有质量的论文从开始到发表至少得一年时间，而大部分科学家们都习惯于用论文这个单一的形式向世界传达他们的理念，却忽略了现有的丰富的媒体渠道。如果这种低效率的方式得以解决，必将极大地加快科技发展的步伐。医学界或许能提前两三年找到癌症的治疗方法，挽救数百万人的生命。
　　试想一下，如果你在互联网上看到的各种信息都是一年前的，你会有什么反应?
　　而对于一些科学家们来说，他们已经习惯以论文的方式向人们展示自己的新发现，而且还要等到这个新发现在论点、论据和论证都达到所谓完美的状态之后才发表出来。而这可能是数年之后的事情了，却不想这几年的延迟会给世界带来怎样的变化。
　　从社会进步的角度来说，科学家们应该要改变他们的传统观念。未来的科学应该具有以下三个特点：
　　1.信息即时发布
　　互联网改变了人们分享信息的方式，大大缩短了信息传递时间，Facebook 和 Twitter 等社交工具上的分享内容几分钟内就能被转发千万次。信息的即时发布和传播促进了更加有效的思想交流。
　　Tim Berners-Lee 发明万维网就是为了方便他与同事更快捷地进行交流，分享自己的研究成果。现在也有越来越多的学术型社交网站可供科学家们进行沟通交流(比如，Academia.edu)。即时的传播让信息分享时间缩短在一天之内甚至更短时间，而这样的改变对世界的发展来说将是巨大的推动力。
　　二十世纪科技发展迅猛，最重要的原因就是电话、电视和互联网等各种新兴通讯技术的发明，没有之一。
　　2.媒体渠道繁多
　　现在，人们可以将分享内容以多种多样的形式展现出来：PPT、视频、图片、博客，甚至一条微博留言和评论就是一个观点。而人们也不需要像当年那样，必须将有用的信息打印复印才能保存，以备不时之需。
　　超级链接也算是一个伟大的发明了，它让论文末尾的“注释”这种老古董彻底退休。一个链接省去了作者繁复的注解工作，也为读者提供了更加直接、丰富的信息资源。
　　3.同行审查
　　信息的即时发布是否就意味着不管好坏对错，一条垃圾信息也能在瞬间传遍全球呢?我认为，发布信息的网站本身以及相关搜索引擎应该参与“同行审查”，即对网络上流传的信息起到一定监督审查作用。读者们则通过网站或搜索到的其他相关内容对信息正误进行判断。
　　科学世界正在经历翻天覆地的变革，而引发这样一场振奋人心的浪潮的是以硅谷为代表的科技中心。在硅谷，每年有将近1万亿美元花在科技研发项目上，有大量新兴科技公司正在迅速崛起。建立一个新的科技生态系统还需要更多资源，工程师、企业家和 VC 都应该行动起来，为科学发展注入新的动力。
原文地址：The Future of Science
英文原版内容：
　　Almost every technological and medical innovation in the world has its roots in a scientific paper. Science drives much of the world’s innovation. The faster science moves, the faster the world moves.
　　Progress in science right now is being held back by two key inefficiencies:
　　The time-lag problem: there is a time-lag of, on average, 12 months between finishing a paper, and it being published.
　　The single mode of publication problem: scientists share their ideas only via one format, the scientific paper, and don’t take advantage of the full range of media that the web makes possible.
　　The stakes are high. If these inefficiencies can be removed, science would accelerate tremendously. A faster science would lead to faster innovation in medicine and technology. Cancer could be cured 2-3 years sooner than it otherwise would be, which would save millions of lives.
　　The time-lag problem
　　The first major inefficiency is the time-lag problem for distributing scientific ideas. After you have written a scientific paper, it takes, on average, 12 months for the paper to be distributed to the global scientific community. During that time the paper is going through the peer review process, which takes an extremely long time.
　　If you read a paper, and have some thoughts about it, and write up a response, it is going to take 12 months for your response to be seen by the global scientific community.
　　Science is fundamentally a conversation between scientists around the world. Currently the intervals between iterations of that conversation are 12 months on average. This 12 month time-lag represents a huge amount of friction in the circulation of scientific ideas.
　　Imagine the slowdown on the web if every blog post, and every tweet, and every photo, was made available on the web 12 months after it was originally posted. Imagine if all the stories in your Facebook News Feed were 12 months old. People would be storming the steps of Congress, demanding change.
　　The time-lag in the distribution of scientific ideas is significantly holding back science. It’s critical for global progress that we work to remove this inefficiency.
　　The single mode of publication problem
　　Historically, if a scientist wants to make a contribution to the scientific body of knowledge, it has to be in the form of a scientific paper.
　　Blogging hasn’t taken off in science, because scientists don’t get credit for writing blog posts. You often hear a scientist saying ‘I’m not going to put these ideas in a blog post, because they are good enough for me to incorporate into a paper, which I’ll publish in the next couple of years’. Everyone loses out because of that delay of a couple of years.
　　Most people who share information on the web have taken advantage of the rich media that the web provides. People share information in all kinds of forms: videos, status updates, blog posts, blog comments, data sets, interactive graphs, and other forms.
　　By contrast, if a scientist wants to share some information on a protein that they are working on, they have to write a paper with a set of two dimensional black and white images of that protein. The norms don’t encourage the sharing of an interactive, full-color, 3 dimensional model of the protein, even if that would be a more suitable media format for the kind of knowledge that is being shared.
　　The future of science: instant distribution
　　Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in order to make it easier for him and his colleagues to share their research papers. The web has impacted science, but over the next few years, the web is going to entirely re-invent the way that scientists interact.
　　In 5-10 years’ time, the way scientists will communicate will be unrecognizable from the way that they have been communicating for the last 400 years, when the first academic journal was founded.
　　The first change will be instant distribution for all scientific ideas. Some sites, such as arXiv, Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate have brought instant distribution to certain sub-fields of science recently, and this trend is going to continue to all fields of science.
　　In a few years, scientists will look back and will struggle to believe that they used to exist in a world where it took 12 months to circulate a scientific idea around the world. Discussing the idea of 12 month distribution delays for ideas will produce the same confused look that it produces today, when one asks someone to conceive of 12 month distribution delays to tweets, blog posts, and general web content.
　　Instant distribution means bringing the time-lag for distributing a scientific paper around the world down to 1 day, or less. This speed-up will have a transformative effect on the rate of scientific progress in the world. Discoveries will be made much more quickly.
　　One of the reasons that technological progress in the 20th century was so much greater than growth in previous centuries is that there were so many powerful communication technologies invented in the 20th century that connected people around the globe: the telephone, the TV, the internet.
　　Bringing instant distribution to science will have a similarly transformative effect on scientific progress.
　　The future of science: rich media
　　Historically scientists have written their papers as native desktop content. They have saved their papers as PDFs, and uploaded the files to the web.
　　Over the next few years, scientific content will increasingly become native web content, and be written natively for the web. Scientific content will be created with the full interactivity, and richness, of the web in mind. Most papers are downloaded from the web, and printed out by scientists for reading. The content was written in such a way that it’s fully readable in print-out form.
　　Most web content is inherently rich. No-one prints out their Twitter and Facebook News Feeds to read them, or blog posts. The idea of printing out content doesn’t make sense for much of the web’s content, such as YouTube videos, Facebook photos, interactive maps, and interactive graphs such as those on you find on Quantcast, or Yahoo Finance.
　　The hyperlink itself is a piece of interactivity built into web content. One reason you don’t want to print out a Wikipedia article to read it is that the page is full of useful links, and you want to be adjacent to that interactivity when reading the article to take advantage of the full power of the article.
　　Historically, scientific papers have cited other papers, but those citations are not hyper-linked.
　　To citizens of the web, the idea of referring to some other page without linking to it seems an impossibly old-fashioned way of sharing content.
　　Imagine reading a blog, or a Facebook News Feed, where there were no links, and everything was plain text. Instead, there was a set of references at the end of the page, and those references told you were to find certain other pages on the web, but the references weren’t themselves hyperlinked. A citation to a video would something like “YouTube.com, Comedy section, page 10, “Coke bottle exploding”, video id = 34883”. You would then have to go to YouTube and navigate to the right section to get the video that has that title.
　　This experience would indeed be a nightmare. The difference between that, and how the web currently is, is the difference between where scientific communication is right now, and where it will be in a few years, when scientists fully adopt the rich media of the web.
　　Scientists will share content in whatever format makes sense for the piece of content in question. They will share ideas in the form of data sets, videos, 3-d models, software programs, graphs, blog posts, status updates, and comments on all these rich media.
　　The ways that these content formats will connect with each other will be via the hyperlink, and not via the citation. The citation will look like an ancient concept in a few years.
　　Science is undergoing one of the most exciting changes in its history. It is in a transition period between a pre-web form of communication to a natively web form of communication. The full adoption of the web by scientists will transform science. Scientists will start to interact and communicate in wonderful new ways that will have an enormous effect on scientific progress.
　　The future of science: peer review
　　In a world of instant distribution, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets published, and no-one will be able to tell whether a particular piece of content is good or bad?
　　I wrote a post on TechCrunch a few weeks ago called “The Future of Peer Review”, arguing that the web has an instant distribution model, and has thrived. I argued that the web’s main discovery engines for content on the web, namely search engines, and social networks, are at their heart, evolved peer review systems.
　　These web-scale peer review systems, search engines and social networks, already drive most discovery of scientific content.
　　The future of science: academic credit
　　Historically scientists have gained credit by publishing in prestigious journals. Hiring committees, and grant committees, historically have looked at the kinds of journals a scientist has managed to get published in as a measure of the quality of the scientist’s work. In the last few years, such committees have also started to look at citation counts too.
　　As scientific content moves to become native web content, scientific content will increasingly be evaluated according to the kinds of metrics that reflect the success of a piece of content on the web.
　　Web metrics vary, and evolve. Some are internet-wide metrics, such as unique visitors, page views, time on site. Others are specific to certain verticals, or sites, such as Twitter follower counts, StackOverflow score, Facebook likes, and YouTube video views.
　　As these metrics are increasingly understood in the context of scientific content, scientists will increasingly share content that attracts this kind of credit.
　　If you can share a data-set, and collect credit for it, you will. If you can comment on a paper, and collect credit for it, you will do that too. If sharing a video of a process is more compelling than having black and white images of the process, videos will take off.
　　Directing Silicon Valley’s resources towards accelerating science
　　Science is in the process of being re-built and transformed. It is going to be an exhilarating process. The positive impact to society will be significant.
　　The next wave of science is not being built by scientific publishers. It is being built by engineering-focused, Silicon Valley tech companies. It is being built by talented and visionary engineering and product teams.
　　Silicon Valley’s formidable resources are starting to turn in the direction of science, having been focused for the past 2-3 years on areas like optimizing strawberry credit flows on FarmVille. Venture capital, entrepreneurial talent, and engineering talent is starting to flow into the space, and the future of science is starting to be built.
　　The ecosystem needs more resources. It needs more engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capital. The prizes for success in transforming science go to everyone in the world. $1 trillion a year gets spent on R&D, of which $200 billion is spent in the academic sector, and $800 billion in the private sector. There are vast new companies waiting to be built here.
　　As the extraordinary Silicon Valley innovation engine increasingly directs itself at transforming science, you can expect to see acceleration on a scale that science has never seen. Science will change beyond recognition, and the positive impact on the rate of technology growth in the world will be enormous.
　　The time to act is now. If you are a VC, invest in science startups. If you are an entrepreneur, hunt for an idea in the space and run with it. If you are an engineer or designer, there is a list of startups trying to accelerate science here.

学术型社交网站Academia.edu融资450万美元，
帮助科研人员免费分享彼此的研究论文
Academia.edu是一个专门供科研人员使用的学术性社交网站，公司刚刚宣布获得一轮450万美元的投资，至此，公司的融资总额已达670万美元。
作为一个非常专业性的社交网站，Academia.edu能够帮助学术科研人员加强彼此间的沟通联系，分享各自最新的学术研究论文，将研究成果惠及更多的人。目前，Academia.edu每天上传近2500份学术研究论文，网站的月独立访客数达300万之多，其中很多访客都是通过谷歌搜索进入这个网站页面的。此外，Academia.edu还会利用自己特有的分析工具帮助研究人员查看阅读了自己研究论文的人数。Academia.edu上的注册科研人员人数已超过81万。