Academia.edu

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Academia, Inc.
Academia.edu logo.svg
Screenshot
Screenshot of Academia.edu (26 Dec 2017).PNG
Type of business Private
Type of site
Platform for sharing research papers
Available inEnglish
Headquarters San Francisco, California
Area servedWorldwide
Founder(s) Richard Price
Employees53 [1]
URL academia.edu
RegistrationRequired
Users 251 million [2]
LaunchedSeptember 2008
Current statusActive

Academia.edu is a for-profit open repository of academic articles free to read by visitors. Uploading and downloading is restricted to registered users. Additional features are accessible only as a paid subscription. Since 2016 various social networking utilities have been added. [3]

Contents

The site was registered in the .edu top-level domain in 1999 when that domain was not limited to educational institutions. It is operated as a for-profit company under the name Academia Inc. Since the launch of the site in 2008, the number of users has grown rapidly, reaching about 10 million daily visits in early 2022. At that time the numbers of registered users was 180 million and 40 million papers were available on the site. [4]

History

Academia.edu was founded by Richard Price. [5]

On its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company uses the legal name Academia Inc. [6] [7]

Months after its acquisition of Academia.edu competitor Mendeley, Elsevier sent thousands of takedown notices to Academia.edu, a practice that has ceased since then, following widespread complaint by academics, according to Academia.edu founder and chief executive Richard Price. [8] [9]

In 2022 the company announced plans to launch ten “open access” journals "to swiftly review and publish their work, in a fresh disruption to the sector". [10]

Competitors

Critics mention several alternatives for free access publications for people who want to make their work freely available. Many universities and educational consortia have their own institutional repositories, including the Big Ten Academic Alliance. Zenodo (funded by The OpenAIRE Consortium) and Humanities Commons both work to keep humanities scholarship online without monetizing it.[ citation needed ] Academia.edu's competitors include ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Mendeley. [11] In 2016 Academia.edu reportedly had more registered users than ResearchGate (about 34 million versus 11 million [12] ) and higher web traffic, but ResearchGate had substantially more active usage by researchers. In 2020, the traffic ranks had reversed, with ResearchGate ranked in the top 150–200 websites globally according to Alexa Internet, whereas Academia.edu was positioned in the 200–300 range.[ citation needed ]

Unpaywall, which collects data about open access versions of academic publications and provides easy access to them, is considered a competitor to Academia.edu for the users who prefer more legally sound green open access hosts. [13]

Criticism

Academia.edu is not a university or institution for higher learning and so under current standards it would not qualify for the ".edu" top-level domain. However, since the domain name "Academia.edu" was registered in 1999, before the regulations required .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions in the US, it is allowed to remain active and operational. All .edu domain names registered before 2001 were grandfathered in, even if not an accredited USA post-secondary institution. [14] [15]

According to the University of Oklahoma libraries, when interacting with Academia.edu, users should keep in mind that "you are not the customer," but rather "you are the product that these services seek to monetize and/or "offer up" to advertisers," that "you might be breaking the law," even if you are uploading your own work," and finally that "there are privacy implications," because a commercial site does not follow professional standards and "may share information about you". [16]

A critic, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the director of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association, said she found the use of the ".edu" domain name by Academia.edu to be "extremely problematic", since it might mislead users into thinking the site is part of an accredited educational institution rather than a for-profit company. [15]

Academia.edu claims it supports the open science or open access movements and, in particular, instant distribution of research, and a peer-review system that occurs alongside distribution, instead of before it. [17] Accordingly, the company stated its opposition to the proposed (since withdrawn) 2011 U.S. Research Works Act, which would have prevented open-access mandates in the U.S. [18]

However, in the view of critic Peter Suber, Academia.edu is not an open access repository and is not recommended as a way to pursue green open access. Peter Suber instead invites researchers to use field-specific repositories or general-purpose repositories like Zenodo. [19]

In early 2016, some users reported having received e-mails from Academia.edu where they were asked if they would be interested in paying a fee to have their papers recommended by the website's editors. [20] This led some users to start a campaign encouraging users to cancel their Academia.edu accounts. [21]

Other criticisms include the fact that Academia.edu uses a vendor lock-in model: "It's up to Academia.edu to decide what you can and can't do with the information you've given them, and they're not likely to make it easy for alternative methods to access". [21] This is in reference to the fact that, although papers can be read by non-users, a free account is needed in order to download papers: "you need to be logged in to do most of the useful things on the site (even as a casual reader)". [21]

In December 2016, Academia.edu announced new premium features that includes data analytics on work and the professional rank of the viewers, [22] which have also received criticism. [23] [24]

Related Research Articles

arXiv Online archive of e-preprints

arXiv is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Some publishers also grant permission for authors to archive the peer-reviewed postprint. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, had hit a million by the end of 2014 and two million by the end of 2021. As of April 2021, the submission rate is about 16,000 articles per month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Preprint</span> Academic paper prior to journal publication

In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.

CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JSTOR</span> Distributor of ebooks and other digital media

JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open access</span> Research publications distributed freely online

Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elsevier</span> Dutch publishing and analytics company

Elsevier is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as The Lancet, Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, Trends, the Current Opinion series, the online citation database Scopus, the SciVal tool for measuring research performance, the ClinicalKey search engine for clinicians, and the ClinicalPath evidence-based cancer care service. Elsevier's products and services include digital tools for data management, instruction, research analytics, and assessment.Elsevier is part of the RELX Group, known until 2015 as Reed Elsevier, a publicly-traded company. According to RELX reports, in 2022 Elsevier published more than 600,000 articles annually in over 2,800 journals; as of 2018 its archives contained over 17 million documents and 40,000 e-books, with over one billion annual downloads.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social Science Research Network</span> Repository for preprints

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a repository for preprints devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences, humanities, life sciences, and health sciences, among others. Elsevier bought SSRN from Social Science Electronic Publishing Inc. in May 2016. It is not an electronic journal, but rather an eLibrary and search engine.

An institutional repository (IR) is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published works to increase their visibility and collaboration with other academics However, most of these outputs produced by universities are not effectively accessed and shared by researchers and other stakeholders As a result academics should be involved in the implementation and development of an IR project so that they can learn the benefits and purpose of building an IR.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DSpace</span> Repository software package

DSpace is an open source repository software package typically used for creating open access repositories for scholarly and/or published digital content. While DSpace shares some feature overlap with content management systems and document management systems, the DSpace repository software serves a specific need as a digital archives system, focused on the long-term storage, access and preservation of digital content. The optional DSpace registry lists almost three thousand repositories all over the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-archiving</span> Authorial deposit of documents to provide open access

Self-archiving is the act of depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as well as theses and book chapters, deposited in the author's own institutional repository or open archive for the purpose of maximizing its accessibility, usage and citation impact. The term green open access has become common in recent years, distinguishing this approach from gold open access, where the journal itself makes the articles publicly available without charge to the reader.

A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records. This is an organised online collection of references to published written works like journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents and books. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a majority of the records in bibliographic databases describe articles and conference papers rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BASE (search engine)</span> Academic search engine

BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on free and open-source software such as Apache Solr and VuFind. It harvests OAI metadata from institutional repositories and other academic digital libraries that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and then normalizes and indexes the data for searching. In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web of Science</span> Online subscription index of citations

The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines. Until 1997, it was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is currently owned by Clarivate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mendeley</span> Reference management software

Mendeley is a reference manager software founded in 2007 by PhD students Paul Foeckler, Victor Henning, Jan Reichelt and acquired by the Dutch academic publishing company Elsevier in 2013. It is used to manage and share research papers and to generate bibliographies for scholarly articles.

An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.

ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a 2014 study by Nature and a 2016 article in Times Higher Education, it is the largest academic social network in terms of active users, although other services have more registered users, and a 2015–2016 survey suggests that almost as many academics have Google Scholar profiles.

OurResearch, formerly known as ImpactStory, is a nonprofit organization that creates and distributes tools and services for libraries, institutions and researchers. The organization follows open practices with their data, code, and governance. OurResearch is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Arcadia Fund.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CORE (research service)</span>

CORE is a service provided by the Knowledge Media Institute based at The Open University, United Kingdom. The goal of the project is to aggregate all open access content distributed across different systems, such as repositories and open access journals, enrich this content using text mining and data mining, and provide free access to it through a set of services. The CORE project also aims to promote open access to scholarly outputs. CORE works closely with digital libraries and institutional repositories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sci-Hub</span> Scientific research paper file sharing website

Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use/reliability and because of the enormous size of its collection: a 2021 study estimated, that Sci-Hub provided access to 95% of all scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers, and on 15 July 2022 Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprises 88,343,822 files.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samvera</span>

Samvera, originally known as Hydra, is an open-source digital repository software product. Samvera main components are Fedora Commons, Solr, Blacklight, and HydraHead. Each Samvera implementation is called a "head".

References

  1. ↑ "Our Mission". Academia.edu. Archived from the original on December 10, 2018. Retrieved December 15, 2018.
  2. ↑ "Academia.edu | About". www.academia.edu. Retrieved February 3, 2024.
  3. ↑ Duffy, Brooke Erin; Pooley, Jefferson D. (January 2017). ""Facebook for Academics": The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu". Social Media + Society. 3 (1): 205630511769652. doi: 10.1177/2056305117696523 .
  4. ↑ Academia.edu. "About". Archived from the original on November 27, 2020. Retrieved April 21, 2022.
  5. ↑ Price, Richard. "Richard Price". Entrepreneur. Archived from the original on February 3, 2022. Retrieved February 3, 2022.
  6. ↑ "A social networking site is not an open access repository". University of California Office of Scholarly Communication. December 2015. Archived from the original on July 11, 2016. Retrieved July 7, 2016.
  7. ↑ "Most followed account on Academia.edu". Academia.edu. Archived from the original on July 18, 2021. Retrieved July 18, 2021.
  8. ↑ Parr, Chris (June 12, 2014). "Sharing is a way of life for millions on Academia.edu". Times Higher Education. Archived from the original on February 8, 2023. Retrieved September 14, 2015.
  9. ↑ Howard, Jennifer (December 6, 2013). "Posting Your Latest Article? You Might Have to Take It Down". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on September 8, 2015. Retrieved September 14, 2015.
  10. ↑ Jack, Andrew (February 21, 2022). "Tencent-backed academic network to launch 'open access' journals". Financial Times. Archived from the original on February 23, 2022. Retrieved February 23, 2022.
  11. ↑ Matthews, David (April 7, 2016). "Do academic social networks share academics' interests?". Times Higher Education . Archived from the original on April 17, 2016. Retrieved April 22, 2016.
  12. ↑ Satariano, Adam (November 15, 2016). "Bill Gates-Backed Research Network Targets Advertising Revenue". Bloomberg . Archived from the original on November 30, 2016. Retrieved November 29, 2016.
  13. ↑ Dhakal, Kerry (April 15, 2019). "Unpaywall". Journal of the Medical Library Association. 107 (2): 286–288. doi:10.5195/jmla.2019.650. PMC   6466485 .
  14. ↑ "edu Policy Information". Net.educause.edu. October 29, 2001. Archived from the original on April 21, 2013. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
  15. 1 2 McKenna, Laura (December 17, 2015). "The Convoluted Profits of Academic Publishing". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on December 19, 2015. Retrieved March 5, 2017.
  16. ↑ Understanding Academia.Edu and Researchgate Archived April 19, 2022, at the Wayback Machine University of Oklahoma University Libraries
  17. ↑ Richard Price (February 5, 2012). "The Future of Peer Review". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on April 30, 2013. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
  18. ↑ Richard Price (February 15, 2012). "The Dangerous "Research Works Act"". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on March 12, 2013. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
  19. ↑ Peter Suber (2016). "Open Access book §10 self help". Archived from the original on July 1, 2016. Retrieved May 19, 2016.
  20. ↑ "Scholars Criticize Academia.edu Proposal to Charge Authors for Recommendations". The Chronicle of Higher Education. January 29, 2016. Archived from the original on August 5, 2020. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
  21. 1 2 3 "Should you #DeleteAcademiaEdu? On the role of commercial services in scholarly communication". Impact of Social Sciences. February 1, 2016. Archived from the original on May 7, 2020. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
  22. ↑ Team, The Academia edu (December 20, 2016). "How do people find your papers? Academia.edu Introduces a New Premium Feature". Medium. Archived from the original on February 2, 2017. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
  23. ↑ "Academia, Not Edu". Planned Obsolescence. October 26, 2015. Archived from the original on January 28, 2017. Retrieved January 26, 2017.
  24. ↑ "The end of Academia.edu: how business takes over, again". diggit magazine. April 26, 2017. Archived from the original on May 1, 2017. Retrieved May 2, 2017.
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