Academia.edu Acquires Plasmyd to Build Next Generation of Peer Review
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) October 23, 2013 -- Academia.edu, the world’s largest online community of scientists, today announced the company has acquired Plasmyd, a peer review and discussion platform for papers. The goal of the acquisition is to utilize Plasmyd’s experience in fostering peer review online to build a more reliable validation system around research. Joining Academia.edu are Plasmyd’s co-founders Adnan Akil and Kevin Wu.
Academia.edu’s mission is get every science PDF ever written on the internet, accessible for free, and to bring scientific research into the 21st century by building a better peer review system around that research. Historically, peer review has consisted of only two or three scientists providing their comments on a paper before publication, which is a small sample size in a world where there are now tens of thousands of researchers in any given field. These small sample sizes have led to a reproducibility crisis in science, where major pharmaceutical companies like Amgen and Bayer have reported that over two-thirds of peer reviewed literature is not reproducible.
“We need to expand peer review so there are vastly more scientists peer reviewing papers, sharing their thoughts and comments on each other’s work. Open science is not just about open access to papers, it’s about opening up the whole scientific process,” said Richard Price, Founder and CEO of Academia.edu.
“Our algorithms allow us to determine scientists in the community with the greatest expertise, and weight their peer reviews accordingly,” said Adnan Akil, co-founder of Plasmyd. “The goal is to build a system that incentivises the top scientists to share their peer reviews and thoughts on papers that they are reading. Academia was the perfect home for us - they’ve built the largest online community of scientists while we’ve been working on building the next generation tools of peer review. Together, we can bring peer review into the modern era.”
Academia launched in 2008 and is now the largest online community of scientists in the world. To date, the company has raised $17.7 million from Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital, True Ventures, and other notable angels.
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About Academia
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company's mission is to accelerate the world's research. Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. 4,308,424 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 1,629,811 papers and 861,492 research interests. Academia.edu attracts over 8 million unique visitors a month.
Academia is on the web at http://www.academia.edu. Connect on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Academia.edu.
Chrysta Olson, The Olson Company, 310-709-2555, [email protected]
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