While Facebook and Twitter have been dominating computer screens over the past few years, another Web site is taking advantage of this social networking craze, but putting a scholarly spin on it.

Academia.edu is a social networking Web site for scholars and researchers who are looking to connect with other people in related fields and get their research read.

Mostly used by graduate and doctorate students and professors, Academia.edu is a free service that anyone can use and allows users to create their own academic Web page.

A user can create a research profile and post their research interests, papers, blogs and other useful Web sites. Just like other social network sites, users can follow people with similar interests, find people they know and even have picture and status updates.
Academia.edu allows the user to follow other academics and see the latest research updates of all the academics they are following in their news feed. The setup is similar to that of Facebook.

Richard Price, CEO of Academia.edu, had the idea for the site when he was finishing his doctorate in philosophy of perception at the University of Oxford. He needed a place where he could easily create an academic Web page to list his research papers online.

Throughout his doctoral education, he had been looking for other people in the area of philosophy of perception. However, it took three years into his research until he came across two people in the same research area.

Price thought it would be useful if there was a Web site where every researcher listed what they worked on so they were easy to discover and collaborate with.

“If you’re a researcher, it’s quite important that you tell the world what you’re working on because you really want your stuff to be read,” Price said. “It’s very important that your work is making an impact on the world.”

Price believes that Academia.edu also makes it easy to follow other people’s work, which is another important aspect of developing good research.

“Once you have shown your work and put it out on the Internet, you want to find out what your colleagues are up to,” he said. “Just like you keep up with your friends on Facebook, Academia has a news feed where you can follow other academics and you can see the research that they are putting together.”

Price moved to San Francisco about two years ago from London and launched Academia.edu in Sept. 2008. It now has close to 106,000 users, but it was not easy for Price to get the funding to start the Web site. He went to a lot of networking events in the tech community in London and built a good list of contacts, but his initial pitches to investors were poor and rusty.

For Price it was a learning process, and there was no substitute for having that network he built. He eventually pitched the idea to the right people and it fell into the right hands.

Academia.edu is funded by venture capital and individual investors. However, Price said in the future they want to create a job board to start pulling in revenue and help people find jobs.

There are six members on the Academia.edu team: four full-time employees and two interns. Their office is currently based out of the living room of Price’s apartment, but will be moving to a downtown San Francisco office in a few weeks.

Dan Feusse, a Dublin, Ohio native and Miami of Ohio graduate, is the marketing intern at Academia.edu. He started his internship about four months ago and believes that Ohio State students and faculty could really relate and benefit from Academia.

“It’s Facebook for academics,” Feusse said. “It’s a social networking hub but for researchers to really find what other people are researching and discover similar topics.”

OSU is among the almost 9,000 universities worldwide participating with Academia.edu and has 361 users in 123 research departments. Being one of the largest universities in the country, Feusse also discussed some of the advantages Academia has for OSU.

“It’s such a big school that it would be pretty hard to meet with other department members, see what other people are working on and what’s going on around them,” he said. “[Academia.edu] allows people to get in touch with other people, whether it’s at the University of Cincinnati, places across the country or across the world.”

Just as it was hard for Twitter to predict three years ago that it would be so huge today, Price believes it’s hard to tell how big Academia.edu can get, but he does raise the bar pretty high.

“There are about 15 million academics in the world and we want to get all of them,” he said. “And we are doing everything it takes to get that. That’s our goal.”