September 16, 2008
New Social Network Hopes to Catalog All Researchers and Their Interests
Richard Price, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s All Souls College, is blasting an e-mail plea to every academic mailing list and blog that he can find asking academics to sign up for his new online directory of researchers worldwide. His goal is to create an online guide to who’s doing what, and where, so scholars can share information and collaborate.
The site, Academia.edu, is the latest effort to create a Facebook-like social network specifically designed for researchers. Others include Graduate Junction and Labmeeting.
So far, Mr. Price says, about 2,300 researchers from about 15 disciplines have set up profiles on the site. He says the service was born out of his own frustration finding peers to talk to while he was finishing his dissertation on philosophy and human perception. “I couldn’t find anyone else in the world who was really working on it,” he says. It was only after three years that he finally bumped into someone at an academic conference with similar research interests.
It’s too soon to tell whether any of these sites will catch on, and it seems that the services will only become valuable if a critical mass of researchers join in. The final winner may be Facebook itself, which an increasing number of scholars are using for professional networking. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Tuesday September 16, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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It would be helpful for Mr. Price to acknowledge the many of us who work as scholars “next door” to formal academia. Not all active, Ph.D.-holding researchers fit within the tidy faculty / postdoc / grad student boxes provided by academia.edu. Some of us are staff at university libraries, for example, or at non-degree granting educational institutions like the Wellcome Institute or the Library of Congress.
— Sharon Goetz Sep 16, 06:54 PM #
How, exactly, did they get ahold of a .edu address for what is clearly not a academic institution?
— Ross Sep 17, 09:30 AM #
Considering that big publishers like Thompson are coming out with systems like this (ResearcherID) I’m surprised he chose this time to launch this platform.
— Vedana Sep 17, 11:22 AM #
What about the Community of Science? www.cos.com has been around since before my time …
— Nikki Sep 17, 12:19 PM #
and what about COS Scholar Universe – saw this a few months ago for the first time – amazing – i think nearly 2 Million Scholars
— Phil Sep 26, 07:05 AM #