Academia.edu
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| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
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Type of site
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Platform for sharing research papers |
| Available in | English |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) | Richard Price |
| Employees | 23 |
| Website | academia |
| Alexa rank |
 654 |
| Registration | Free |
| Users | 36 million |
| Launched | September 2008 |
| Current status | Active |
Academia.edu is a venture-capital funded private company that provides a social networking website for academics. The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field. It was launched in September 2008, with 31 million registered users as of January 2016 and over 8 million uploaded texts. Academia.edu was founded by Richard Price, who raised $600,000 from Spark Ventures, Brent Hoberman, and others.
Academia.edu proclaims 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 prior to it. Accordingly, the company stated its opposition to the proposed (since withdrawn) 2011 U.S. Research Works Act, which would have prevented open-access mandates in the U.S.
However, Academia.edu is not an open access repository and is not recommended as a way to pursue green open access by Peter Suber and experts, who instead invite researchers to use field-specific repositories or general-purpose repositories like Zenodo.
Many academics are happy about the increased publicity their research can garner due to the website, but some are worried about the effect on research and science in general, especially since Academia.edu refuses to make its business model public.TechCrunch remarked that Academia.edu gives academics a "powerful, efficient way to distribute their research" and that it "will let researchers keep tabs on how many people are reading their articles with specialized analytics tools", and "also does very well in Google search results". Academia.edu seems to reflect a combination of social networking norms and academic norms. In the summer of 2015, the blogging platform was removed.
Months after its acquisition of Academia.edu rival Mendeley, Elsevier sent thousands of takedown notices to Academia.edu, a practice that has since ceased following widespread complaint by academics, according to Academia.edu founder and chief executive Richard Price.
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