Academia.edu
| Academia.edu
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Private |
| founding | September 2008 |
| Seat | San Francisco , California, USA |
| management | Richard Price |
| Number of employees | 43 |
| Website | academia.edu |
Academia.edu is a company that operates a commercial document server. It was founded in 2008 by Richard Price. Academia.edu sees itself as a distribution station for OpenAccess papers that are uploaded and managed by the authors themselves. In 2015, a peer review function called "Draft Session" was added, which supports the annotation of PDF documents. Another functionality is to be able to follow the activities of other users via a follow button. In 2019 there were well over 100 million users worldwide.
Functions
Academia.edu was described as a future-proof platform at the Open Science Summit 2012, which both increases the speed of science communication and reduces costs. The platform is designed in a minimalist way and has a high number of new users per month. In contrast to established preprint servers such as ArXiv , document upload is kept simple. Non-university members can also register with a Google account . You will then receive a prefixed "independent" to your profile in the URL. While ResearchGate may be more widespread in the natural, social and human sciences (including psychology), Academia.edu has more of a focus on the humanities. There are numerous papers on philosophy and art history. However, the content profiles of both scientific networks are similar, so that this is only a limited selection criterion. However, in a survey carried out by Times Higher Education magazine in 2016 with 20,670 participants worldwide, ResearchGate was named as the leading network and was therefore about twice as popular in terms of overall size as the second most widely used academic network Academia.edu.
Commercial company
The organization academia.edu is a commercial company, even if the top-level domain .edu gives the impression of a public institution, because today it is only offered to US public universities and the like. Ä. is awarded. The company's .edu domain is, however, subject to grandfathering, as it was already registered to accredited educational institutions before the 2001 restriction. (The company was only founded in 2008.)
criticism
Academia.edu has been confronted several times with so-called "takedown" requests from Elsevier Verlag. Academia.edu was accused of having uploaded copyrighted documents there. Academia.edu reacted to the takedown requests and removed the relevant documents from the network, and users were also informed, which annoyed some authors.
Academia.edu is criticized because it sends messages that are perceived as spam. This affects co-authors of papers who are not yet members themselves. Apparently Academia.edu is trying to use aggressive methods to increase its user base.
At Academia, some services of a scientific network (display of references in other publications, etc.), some of which are available from other scientific networks (e.g. ResearchGate), are only accessible with a paid premium membership (currently 99 US dollars per year) and you receive mails for services (e.g. a mention in other texts), but when you click further you are regularly informed that you have to switch to the paid version in order to be able to use the services advertised in the mails at all.
In a blog of the Technical University of Berlin , Academia.edu was only recommended to a limited extent for scientific publishing, as the operators forbid parallel publication in an established journal for copyright reasons. In addition, Academia.edu is not considered a real OpenAccess server because there is no DOI key assignment.
The website is financed through advertising and the premium memberships mentioned above. This is how large-scale, animated banner advertising is placed.
Academia.edu is also criticized for pursuing profit goals with the appearance of open access and acting in a non-transparent manner. For example, the top-level domain .edumistakenly points to a public university, but in fact it is a commercial company based in San Francisco . There have therefore been several calls to boycott Academia.edu, for example through an article that Forbes published.
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Academia.edu: About. Retrieved October 28, 2019 .
- ↑ Daniel Cressey: Social network launches bid to get academics chattering about papers online. September 25, 2015, accessed December 18, 2016 .
- ^ Academia.edu: Hiring. Retrieved November 27, 2019 .
- ^ Richard Price: Academia.edu & The Future of Science. November 7, 2012, accessed December 18, 2016 .
- ↑ Do academic social networks share academics' interests? In: timeshighereducation.com . April 6, 2016, accessed July 7, 2016 .
- ↑ Olivia Solon: Elsevier clamps down on academics posting their own papers online. December 17, 2013, accessed December 18, 2016 .
- ↑ Michaela Voigt: Upload article to ResearchGate and Co: Which publisher allows what? And what is Open Access actually like? August 10, 2016, accessed December 18, 2016 .
- ^ Sarah Bond: Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia, Edu . In: Forbes . ( forbes.com [accessed August 8, 2018]).