Academia.edu | Full Stack Engineer | San Francisco, CA | Onsite
Academia.edu is addressing two problems:
- Open access. The goal here is to put every academic pdf ever written on the internet, available for free.
- The reproducibility crisis. It has emerged over the last few years that 65-90% of the scientific literature is not reproducible. What this means is that if you try to reproduce the experiments described in a paper, 65-90% of the time you will not get the same findings. This is known as "the reproducibility crisis"
With regard to open access, Academia allows academics to upload papers to Academia, and make them freely available. Academics have uploaded about 16 million pdfs to Academia.edu, and upload about 1 million a month. About 30 million people come to Academia each month to access and share papers.
With regard to reproducibility, we think the way to solve the reproducibility crisis is to build a new peer review system that (a) crowd-sources peer review from the academic community and (b) provides credit to material that journals don't publish (data-sets, code, replications, failed replications).
Academia has built a recommendation system which is the basis of our approach to (a) and (b). We realize that addressing reproducibility is a huge challenge. We need mission-driven engineers to come and help us. We have raised $28 million from Tencent, Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital, and True Ventures. Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital writes "We believe open science is really important. We believe Academia.edu is going to have a profound impact on the world."
We are looking to hire full stack software engineers. Technologies we use include Ruby, Rails, Postgres, DynamoDB, React. Our office is in downtown San Francisco. For more information, visit http://academia.edu/hiring. If you are interested to learn more, please email Richard Price at richard [at] academia.edu