Adnan Akil

Capital is Eating the World

2025-07-05T00:00:00Z

Twelve charts on the long-term shift from labor to capital in U.S. income distribution.

Let’s Fix Academic Publishing

2018-05-09T00:00:00Z

Recently I emailed a user of the site and got a very frustrated response. I think I’ve done a poor job at explaining the idea. The idea was that you would submit your paper to a board of editors on Academia.edu, and if it was found to be worthy by an editor, it would receive a recommendation. It would work exactly like the Public Library of Science and most Open Access publishing, in which you pay to publish and only pay if you are accepted. The goal with those systems is to benefit readers — for example readers in less rich countries who can’t afford access to the material. The cost of publishing is then shifted to the authors rather than to the readers.¹

I’d like to stress that this is just an idea and just the beginning of the conversation on how to fund academic publishing. Take this example of a paper published in Signs. As someone who does not have a university subscription I have to pay 14 dollars to the Chicago Press to read the article.

Paying that much per article is prohibitively expensive for an individual attempting serious research without access to a library subscription.² I don’t think authors paying for publications and opening up their work undermines the publication. The separation of the editorial and financial staffs is not just built into the system, it’s built into the character of every reviewer who works hard to legitimize the works of their peers. When I was a grad student, there was no amount of money someone could have paid me to fake a review, and I’m sure most academics feel the same way. We’re trying to optimize for a system that is open, affordable and fair. I think we can agree that charging authors instead of readers may be difficult on authors but does not correlate with undermining the legitimacy of publications. Publications are not equal to recommendations, but they are similar in that they both rely on the objectivity of academic reviewers to legitimize them.

Academia.edu was started by a PhD and is staffed by academics, writers, artists and one historian. What we’re trying to do is accelerate the publication and dissemination of research in a sustainable way. We hate paywalls. Almost 60% of our traffic comes from Asia, from universities that often can’t afford journal subscription fees. A lot of these researchers benefit from the free availability of work online. This is crucial for us. Even many existing institutional and departmental repositories are closed silos that don’t allow people from outside the institution to connect or participate. At UCSD, my alma mater, we use the eScholarship system, which allows only members to post and offers no ability to connect with authors. I believe that any researcher from any university, or none, should be able to find, read and participate in the sharing of research regardless of accreditation or background.

Academic publishing is broken. Paywalls, double dipping and private library subscriptions are all examples of things that hurt both readers and authors. But funding academic publishing is not an easy problem to solve. There are all kinds of costs that go into any publication you’ve ever read, even in the existing system where authors and peer reviewers are typically not compensated: servers, editors, typesetters, engineers, etc. In fact Cell Reports charges an astronomical $5,000 for an accepted publication, and even at the low end of peer reviewed OA publications, PeerJ charges $700 per article. Our goal in the idea I floated was radical inclusivity: price it to include as many people as we can into the market, then waiver everyone else in.

We need to have this discussion. Clearly it won’t be an easy one but it’s necessary. Not only is traditional publishing making the world more closed, it is draining universities of funds that could go to faculty, infrastructure, student resources or any number of things that move the university forward. The folks at the OLH believe that either APCs or library memberships are the future of OA humanities publishing.³ To go from free publishing to paying is a hard pill to swallow, but on the macro level I think there’s a good case that it makes the system better. I’m happy to have this conversation with anyone who wants to debate the points. Feel free to send me an email if you want to fix publishing.

Special thanks to David, Ben and Nate for reading early versions of this.

Gold open access, Wikipedia. ↩
Even Harvard is getting priced out of journal subscriptions: If Harvard Can’t Afford Academic Journal Subscriptions, Maybe It’s Time for an Open Access Model, Time. ↩
In his book, Open Access and the Humanities, Martin Eve talks about how to fund OA publishing. ↩

My User Research Stack

2018-05-09T00:00:00Z

“Talk to your users” is pretty standard advice for startups of almost any size.¹ Having heard this from many startup elders, I was clear on the why but not on the how. A few hundred user interviews later and I think I have a better understanding of the process. I found that the goal isn’t so much to talk to your users about your product but to understand how you can empower them to reach their goals.²

My general aim when trying to understand a product’s viability is to start with a broad domain, like academic publishing, and then find 10 people who have experience in that space. I usually email about 5X as many people as I need to account for funnel effects. From there I set up Skype calls, record the conversations, transcribe them and then annotate the text.

In the conversation I try to optimize for open ended exploratory questions then whittle my way down to specifics. I go in with a script and return to it when I’ve exhausted a tangent. Questions like “Would you use this?” almost never return good signal.³ By focusing on questions of process and motive I can better understand what the user is trying to do and how the product can help her. An example would be

Adnan: What do you do with your paper after it’s published?

Ayesha: We usually send out the link and PDF to our department’s mailing list.

Adnan: Why’s that?

Ayesha: Well, it’s important to show your colleagues and people in the field that you’re doing cool things.

Adnan: Is it important to get replies to your emails?

Ayesha: Yeah, it’s very helpful to hear how it was received.

To me it sounds like Ayesha is interested in the impact her research has in the field. She’s trying to get the word out about her work and she’s also looking for feedback. These are all user goals that we try to turn into features.

So here’s the stack I use for all this:

MixMax (mixmax.com) to send emails and coordinate scheduling. MixMax makes it easy to send up to 300 emails in one go and has great scheduling features.
Skype for calls. Everyone has Skype, it sucks but it’s the easiest thing to use when you’re trying to connect with a stranger and talk face to face.
Ecamm’s call recorder (ecamm.com). Does what it says on the tin. It integrates with Skype so you can just record the entirety of your Skype chat. Make sure to ask users before recording them.
Jotengine (jotengine.com). Send them an audio clip, get a word for word transcription within 4 hours. This part is magical because it means I can focus on the interview without worrying about taking notes or asking someone else to take notes.
Quip/Google Docs. I like both of these for reviewing and commenting on the transcript. Quip is more geared towards annotating (it has a separate section for annotations) but everyone has Google Docs.

segment.com/academy/archives/talk-to-your-users-or-else, blog.kippt.com/2012/08/07/go-out-talk-to-your-users, twitter.com/paulg/status/706883322215989248. ↩
Probably worth noting I’m talking about when you’re still in a exploratory stage looking to build something great. If you have traction and things are moving, then yes, talking about the specific product will help you find optimizations in your flow (i.e “I can’t see where all my customers are in one place”). ↩
People are often agreeable with strangers. In general there’s too much downside for being disagreeable with strangers, most people I’ve interacted with play it safe. The answer to “would you use this?” is almost always “sure, I can see myself doing that.” It’s then very hard to separate the sincere validation from the agreeability. ↩

Separating Skepticism and Cynicism

2018-05-09T00:00:00Z

Cynicism is the belief that people inherently suck. That no matter what is happening or who is involved, things are not going to work out. Skepticism, on the other hand, is approaching life with a sense of doubt. For example, if I’m being cynical about a product like Airbnb I’d say “This will never work, people will never trust strangers to live in their homes.” A skeptic might say “Will people feel comfortable staying in a stranger’s home? Will they feel safe? Would property damage be a concern for the host?” Both mechanisms start from doubt but the Skeptic doesn’t rely on the nebulous distrust of humanity to fuel that doubt. The difference is slight but can be instrumental in how an idea or product evolves.

Product development thrives on the doubt of skepticism and suffocates under the pessimism of cynicism. For example, the statement “No one will ever open their home to a stranger” doesn’t open the floor to new conversations. There is no meaningful follow up to this statement because there is no specific concern. You’d have to argue your view on culture as a whole. With skepticism you’re channeling your intuition but in a structured manner that fosters discussion. “Would people be able to get into a stranger’s home as easily as a hotel?” Questions that articulate your doubts yield product priorities.

The difficulty at this point is differentiating between cynicism and skepticism. If we agree that cynicism is harmful to product development and skepticism is necessary, then we must take care to identify them correctly. Confusing cynicism for skepticism may prematurely kill ideas that have merit, but the more common occurrence of confusing skepticism for cynicism damages our product development.

The confusion often comes into play with new ideas. Exposing our new ideas to the harsh climate of skepticism is rough on the ego. When our new ideas are met with skepticism we find it easier to blame cynicism than to lean into the doubt and evolve the idea.

When developing an idea around academic discussions our initial feedback showed that academics did not want to openly discuss papers online. While at first it seemed like the cynical view of a few academics, we found that it actually contained some product priorities: publicly open discussions carried too much of a risk for being ridiculed. Making the discussions ephemeral and familiar were important to getting traction. As of this writing Sessions (our discussion product) represents ~9% of the daily peer reviews in the world.¹

The process of converting user goals into features yields the best results when we are able to identify why someone hasn’t reached their goal and what we can do to help. Evolving an idea is an iterative process that requires us to address the correct negative feedback. Avoiding cynicism gives our ideas room to grow and leaning into skepticism pushes them to evolve.

Based on a 1.5 million papers published per year statistic. ↩