San Francisco, CA. Full time.
Academia.edu is a social platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research. 3.7m academics have joined Academia.edu, and over 300k join each month.
Many people believe that science is too closed, and too slow. We are trying to make science faster and more open. There are 4 things we are trying to achieve with Academia.edu:
- Instant distribution. Right now there is a 12 month time-lag between submitting a paper to a journal, and the paper being published. We need to make publishing a button, and the distribution of scientific ideas instant.
- Better peer review. Currently two people peer review a paper, which is too small a sample size. With 50,000 people worldwide in a research community like Machine Learning, or breast cancer, what 2 people think is not statistically significant. We need a broader-based peer review process, one that surfaces the opinions from the entire scientific community.
- Data-sets. Scientists don't share their data-sets right now. The data remains stuck on their hard-drives. The main reason for this is a lack of incentives for the scientists to share their data. We need to introduce the right reputation mechanisms in science to facilitate the sharing of data. -
- Open access. We need to bring about a world where a villager in India has the same access to the world’s scientific output as a professor in Harvard. When you open up access to the world’s scientific literature to the 2.5 billion people who are online right now, magical things can happen.
We're a 12-person engineering-driven team based in downtown San Francisco. Technologies we use include Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Varnish, Solr, Memcached, and Mongodb.
We have raised $6.7 million from Spark Capital, True Ventures, Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu), and others.
We are looking to hire software engineers to help build a faster and more open science.
There is more information about the company on our hiring page, at <a href="http://academia.edu/hiring" >. There is more on TechCrunch about our mission here <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/05/the-future-of-peer-review/" > (The Future of Peer Review) and here <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/03/the-future-of-the-scientific-journal-industry/" > (Reputation Metrics in Science)
We will handle re-location, including visas. We are not currently hiring remote employees.
If you are interested to learn more, please email Richard Price at richard [at] academia.edu.
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2013)