Academia.edu wants to build a completely new system for scientists to share their results, one that is totally independent of the current journal system.

Here is the current way scientific publishing works. A scientist does some experiments and writes up a paper. He sends it to a journal who sends it out to two or three peer reviewers. They peer review it, which means writing a page of comments on it, and recommending either accepting or rejecting it. Usually you get a few journal rejections, and the average time-lag between finishing the paper and its being published is 12 months. Then the paper is behind a paywall and people have to pay $35 to read it.

Our view of scientific publishing is that once you have finished writing a paper, you should post it immediately on the internet. Peer review should be done post-publication, and it should be done by the community, Reddit-style, not by just two or three people. We believe peer review will be more robust that way. And the paper should be openly and freely accessible for anyone to read, along with the data and any accompanying materials like source code.

Ultimately the goal is to increase the pace of scientific discovery, so that we can accelerate research into curing diseases, reducing infant mortality, discovering clean energy, amongst other things.

Here are some recent articles on Academia.edu and its mission:

• How one publisher is stopping academics from sharing their research
• A publishing giant goes after the authors of its journals’ papers
• Peer review needs to expand so that more scientists are reviewing papers
• Bloomberg TV interview
• Meet Academia.edu, a startup that wants to publish every science PDF online
• TechCrunch guest post on the future of the scientific journal industry.

Watch Richard Price's interview on This Week In Startups: