I'd love to see their business plan, too. As of now, since they don't charge anything, you have to assume that the users are the product.

From what I can make of the publicly available information (mostly interviews with Richard), AE's primary business model is to spot research trends early and then sell this information to customers (e.g., industry, governments, etc.). One seemingly simple example of this would be to identify trends in drug/medical research and sell it to the large pharmaceutical companies. Anyone who has worked in academics knows that the lag between when research is done and when it is published is substantial (months to years). A drug company getting 12 month research head start on the competition would be huge. I can only imagine that this carries over to a large number of other fields (economics, aeronautics, finance, any field related to energy, etc.).

CHARGING FOR DATA

A few other ideas about how they could charge institutions for data (the current job board doesn't seem to be very data-driven):

- Information about trending majors and research areas so that the number and type of faculty matches at a research school matches the market demand (e.g., of research journals, grants, students, etc.).

- Headhunter info for schools looking to recruit promising young academics as either students or professors. Elite schools would likely pay big money to find the multitude of really smart, really talented, and really motivated students who just never think of going to an elite school (there are A LOT of them). Additionally, some extremely capable grad students get lost in the tenure track professor mix because they didn't attend a name/feeder school (for whatever reason).

- Honeypot for Big Bro.

OTHER THINGS TO CHARGE FOR

A few things AE and their competitors could probably charge for (note that I think that grad students are a much larger market than their professors):

- Marketplace for editing.

- Autogenerated lists of "interesting" articles/books based on user input (e.g., articles the user likes, keyword analysis of a draft of a paper, etc.). The tech and algo concepts exist to do this, but I think the people how can do it have bigger fish to fry.

- EndNote competitor that works really well. All the pieces for a (near-)perfect product are out there, but no one has really put them together in one place.

- Repos for grad student work and papers and/or for research teams. There is a lot of potential here, many of which I would have loved to have on both the student and professor ends:

a) tracking student research progress (e.g., data collection commits, draft commits, etc.)

b) collaborative resource development and/or sharing (e.g., data sets, citation lists, etc.)

c) peer review (both inside and outside of a student's school and department)

d) aggregated publication outlets for stance pieces or small exploratory studies that rarely get published but often provide valuable insights

e) a variety of writing models for other students to learn from

FOR THE GOOD OF ACADEMICS

A few things that they could reach to do for the good of academics but probably won't due to minimal profit potential:

- Facilitate the development of a large number of online journals with decent standards. All of the pieces are there on a site like AE, but there needs to be a ringleader or evangelist. This proliferation of peer reviewed publications with a decent level of standards would remove a lot of the politics from academic publishing and would let the market of ideas determine which research is most important.

- Connecting researchers (both students and academics) with similar research interests. You would think the internet would make this easy, but my personal experiences and the experiences I have witnessed of others suggests otherwise.

- Tracking and teaching people about their intellectual heritage -- for example, what are the branches of Whiteheadian philosophy, which branch are you in, and how does your branch compare and contrast with other branches.

Richard is a smart guy, and I wouldn't be too quick to bet against him. While AE isn't the most pleasant site to use in its current state, I think there is a lot of potential for something great to happen. I look forward to hearing more about AE's journey to bring that greatness to be.

[edited for formatting]