Enjoy the Disruption

I’m a little baffled by the recent $35M funding round, which included Bill Gates, for social network for scientists ResearchGate. And of course the media baiting quote from RG that it wants to win a Nobel Prize for its efforts.

One look at the traffic stats tells you all you need to know as a potential investor. The graph below is from Alexa, which is known to undercount traffic, but it can be used to reliably compare competitors relative to each other. The redline is Academia.edu and the blue is ResearchGate over the past six months. Alexa ranks RG at the 5,433 most visited site, with Academia.edu at 2,686 most visited.

While RG claims to have 2.9M users, only a very tiny fraction of those are actives. Other traffic analytics stats confirm these numbers. My guess is roughly <5% at most are active each month (active meaning visit the site at least once). Then there is roughly the same amount of non-registered users visting the site per month. Are at most 145K registered users (+150K non users) visiting the site per month, with no revenue other than a small jobs board, worth $35M in funding? This probably values RG north of $150-200M. I must be missing something, or else Academia.edu should ask for $70M in its next funding round.

Then there is the value proposition. I fail to see any with RG. Academia.edu doesn’t have a lot either, but certainly more than RG. A lot of scientists have also compared Mendeley to RG and Academia.edu, which definitely has value proposition to users, and never raised such a round. One could also throw in FigShare, which has some overlapping functionality and more value add, yet it has never achieved anywhere near such funding to date. 

Probably the biggest strike against such a large round however is researcher sentiment. I’ve yet to meet anyone exclaiming RG as beneficial to their work (quite the opposite in fact with many reports of spamming and site scraping). On the other hand, I hear plenty of scientists talking about the value of FigShare, Mendeley, Papers, and even Academia.edu to their work. One has to wonder what kind of due diligence was done by the investors here.

CHORUS is another attempt by subscription publishers to defeat Open Access. Probably no better writeup than Michael Eisen’s of how deceptive the intent and logic of this plan is.

CHORUS claims that it will save the US govt money if implemented, as part of the plan calls for the shuttling of PubMedCentral. The fallacy of course, is that costs to the govt (i.e. taxpayers) will actually INCREASE as publishers now have control of the “Open Access” content via a CrossRef like dispatching service. To maintain this dispatch service requires passing on the costs to their journal subscriptions — that ultimately means the libraries and agencies foot the bill.

If this is really going to save taxpayers money, then why have the publishers that are part of CHORUS not provided a cost break down? Let’s see the expected operating costs, charges to publishers to join this new organization, and the details of the API restrictions and practicality of retrieving the full-text for data mining. Then let’s compare that spreadsheet to the cost of running PubMedCentral. But that’s just the financial cost; more concerning is the cost of giving control of Open Access content to organizations whose business model is counter to the principles of OA.

Are these APIs truly open? What happens if I decide to build an aggregator with this content that is supposed to be Open Access? Will I be restricted or charged for high volume access, because publishers are now losing eyeballs as researchers go to my aggregator search engine? Do we really want publishers in charge of the key to the only source of all embargoed Open Access content? How gullible do they think the Obama Administration is? 

CHORUS is a patronizing plan to researchers, libraries, and the American taxpayer. It’s a coordinated effort to sustain subscription-based publisher revenue streams and falsely paint PubMedCentral as a waste of taxpayer money. It is not about innovating on Open Access content and expanding its accessibility.