The poison of academia.edu

All those working in academics or research have surely heard about academia.edu. It started out as a service for academics, in their own words:

Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company’s mission is to accelerate the world’s research.

But as with most of these platforms, they need to get money, and since some months now academia.edu is pressing users to pay into a premium account at the incredible rate of 8.25USD per month.

This is about he same you pay for Netflix, or some other streaming service. If you remain on the free side, what remains for you to do is SNS-like stuff, and uploading your papers so that academia.edu can make money from it.

What I am really surprised that they can pull this of at a .edu domain. The registry requirements state

For Institutions Within the United States. To obtain an Internet name in the .edu domain, your institution must be a postsecondary institution that is institutionally accredited by an agency on the U.S. Department of Education’s list of Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies (see recognized accrediting bodies).
Educause web site

Seeing what they are doing I think it is high time to request removal of the domain name.

So let us see what they are offering for their paid service:

• Reader “The Readers feature tells you who is reading, downloading, and bookmarking your papers.”
• Mentions “Get notified when you’re cited or mentioned, including in papers, books, drafts, theses, and syllabuses that Google Scholar can’t find.”
• Advanced Search “Search the full text and citations of over 18 million papers”
• Analytics “Learn more about who visits your profile”
• Homepage – automatically generated home page from the data you enter into the system

On the other hand, the free service is consisting of SNS elements where you can follow other researchers, see when they upload/input an event, and that is it more or less. They have lured a considerable amount of academics into this service, gathered lots of papers, and now they are showing their real face – money.

In contrast to LinkedIn, which also offers paid tier, but keeps the free tier reasonably usable, academia.edu has broken its promise to “accelerate the world’s research” and even worse, it is NOT a “platform for academics to share research papers”. They are collecting papers and sell access to them, like the publisher paywalls.

I consider this kind of service highly poisonous for the academic environment and researchers.