Publish Academic Papers
There is every reason for peer-reviewed articles to be circulating through Medium.
As it is, the average person has very few ways to digest academic papers. It pretty much boils down to,
- Google something you were already curious about, or
- Be in college and have a professor break it down for you.
Worse yet, there is no way to digest academic material in well designed and readable fashion. Have you tried reading articles on JSTOR? It’s the worst.
And lastly, there doesn’t exist a personalized feed where a user would find academic articles that would be relevant or interesting to the user.
Medium has the capacity to solve these problems quite easily — just create a collection populated with academic studies. There definitely exists a world where Medium partners with something like JSTOR or another publisher of academic journals to negotiate the issue of intellectual property rights.
There also exists a world where Medium partners with well-known academics and convinces them to write articles on Medium that are either a) supplemental to an article they’ve published, or b) the articles themselves. Medium has all of the editorial capacities to handle the structure of academic papers.
If this happens, Medium will create a new frontier. They would give the average person unprecedented access to knowledge in a way the world has never seen before.
