PLASMYD: Acquired for an undisclosed price by SF, CA-based Academia.edu, which will also be bringing Plasmyd co-founders Adnan Akil and Kevin Wu on its team. Plasmyd offered an online search engine and peer review platform with over 60 million research papers indexed, and the site will be shuttered as the technology will be integrated with Academia.edu, an online network where researchers can connect with one another and share papers. (TechCrunch reports it recently surpassed 5 million users.) In the press release, Akil said "the goal is to build a system that incentivi[z]es the top scientists to share their peer reviews and thoughts on paper they are reading." VentureBeat has more on how this deal can make the peer review process more reliable.
