Should You Share Your Research on Academia.edu?
Academia.edu’s motto, “share research,”
may sound like a godsend to scholars who want to do everything possible
to make sure their work echoes far beyond the ivory tower. The
pared-down social network lets users connect with colleagues, post their
own publications, and track the readership of their work—all without
having to dig through photographs of people’s cats and reactions to
whatever is on TV.
It’s a message with resonance, as the site’s growth bears out.
More than 7 million people have created academic profiles on the site,
says Richard Price, the company’s founder and CEO, with more than
800,000 joining each month. “Around 25 percent come back each month,” he
says, “which is a return rate comparable to Twitter’s.”
But the appeal of that motto is precisely what worries publishers like Elsevier,
the self-declared “leading provider of science and health information.”
Starting in late 2013, Elsevier began demanding that Academia.edu—and
institutions such as University of Calgary, University of
California-Irvine, and Harvard University—take down research
publications that, in many cases, authors had posted themselves.
As the Washington Post
recently reported: “The takedown campaign goes against a long-standing
industry practice in which journal publishers look the other way when
academics post their own work.”
Price told the Post in December that Academia.edu, which had previously gotten one or two takedown requests
a week, had received 2,800 in the span of a few weeks. Two months
later, Price says, the takedown notices have stopped, and he isn’t sure
whether they will return.
The takedown process might sound familiar to scholars who recall
the entertainment industry’s campaign against copyright violations on
YouTube and on file-sharing networks. First Academia.edu receives a
takedown request citing the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA). Then staff members remove the paper and notify the author
that his or her work has been taken down.
There’s generally no additional action taken against the author,
and there is an opportunity for appeal. “The DMCA framework allows the
author to counter-file if they would like,” Price says. “There is a form
they have to fill in to do that.”
Even when Academia.edu was receiving 2,800 requests, it was a
small percentage of the more than 2.3 million papers on Academia.edu.
But it’s cause for concern for academics who are drawn to the site
precisely because it promises to disseminate their research. If you’re
posting your work on Academia.edu now, should you stop? Or change your
standards for what makes it onto your profile page?
That depends on whom you ask. Tyrus Miller,
vice provost and dean of graduate studies at University of California,
joined Academia.edu in November 2012. Like many academics, he advocates
“as broad a use of open-access publication and as broad a legal
construal of scholarly fair use as possible.” It’s too late for
Elsevier’s takedown demands to make a serious impact, he says: “The
genie is already way out of the bottle.”
Yet Miller advises against using the site to share brand-new
publications that aren’t open access. “I wouldn't, for instance, scan a
newly published book chapter in an edited volume and post it
immediately,” he says. “But I think after a year or so, a posting
probably boosts the prominence and prestige, perhaps even sales, of the
book, rather than taking them away.”
Unclear on whether your journal would sign off? You could always just ask. Before posting her papers, Jenny Bledsoe,
a Ph.D. student in English at Emory University, obtains permission from
journal staff. In her experience, journals are typically glad to allow
authors to post PDFs with proper credit and a link to the journal site.
“Journals sometimes specify a pre-print PDF rather than the
finished product as the appropriate document to share on Academia.edu,”
she says. “As Academia.edu grows in popularity, I think journals will
establish policies and guidelines for posting PDFs on the site.”
Remember: As Bledsoe points out, this is still murky territory.
Publishers, journals, and scholars are all feeling their way around.
James Elkins, chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, doesn’t think scholars should
worry too much about takedown demands. He points to the website Scribd, which bills itself as “the world's largest digital library.”
“I post everything, including, in some cases, entire books, and I
have never seen evidence that those postings have hurt sales or that the
material has been plagiarized,” he says. “Scribd has several high-level
partnerships”—with publishers that include HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster—“and yet the same site doesn't police people who upload other people's work and charge for it!”
Elkins, who is currently editing a Penn State University Press
book series, tells a story to demonstrate the challenges of cracking
down on online content distribution. Last year, a week after he received
his first advance copy of a volume in the series, he saw a full PDF
available for free on the site aaaaarg.org.
The PDF was an uncorrected proof, which Elkins interpreted to mean that
someone at the press had leaked it. But when he emailed the editor to
express concern, she said she was unable to log on to the site.
“The difficulty the Penn State employee had, and—I assume—the fact
that they didn't pursue the matter, shows me how disconnected some
publishers are from the digital world, and therefore how unlikely it is
that any publisher or content provider will effectively police the many
illegal uploads,” Elkins says.
'Like a Newspaper'
There’s a broader question here, though: If you’re not using (or are barely using) Academia.edu, should you start?
Elkins may be the right person to ask. He appears to be one of the
scholars with the most visibility on Academia.edu, and he recommends it
widely—even though he briefly quit the site in 2009. “I no longer use
this site,” he posted at the time, because Academia.edu “is too slow,
too limited in its interactions, and awkwardly formatted for messages.
(And is an ‘I like’ with a star really a good thing for an academic
site?)”
But in 2010, he joined again, and he now receives about 100
notifications every day from Academia.edu about colleagues subscribing
to his feed, reading his publications, or posting their own research.
He’s even decided to stop monitoring his LinkedIn page,
despite a network of 2,500 connections. He now dismisses LinkedIn as
“mainly for white-collar workers looking for jobs, who need
introductions to people because they feel they can't write directly to
prospective employers,” and he is disappointed with what he views as a
lack of active and central scholars on the site.
A disclaimer on his LinkedIn profile directs readers to, among other profiles, his Academia.edu page.
Academia.edu keeps track of pageview stats, so Elkins knows that his
profile has received nearly 40,000 views, and that the papers he has
posted have received more than 125,000. Those readers also tend to be
active users of the site, which helps Elkins stay informed about
developments in his field. “I use Academia.edu like a newspaper,” he
says.
Numbers like those are enough to convince many scholars looking to develop an audience. Heidi Campbell,
associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University, is
among them. Don’t jump on to Academia.edu expecting to find vibrant
discussions or active networkers, she says. Think of it instead as a
“great way to share my work and let others know about my scholarship.”
“While it has not been that useful for me as a social-networking
tool or for building collaborations,” she says, “it offers some great
features that have spread the word about my work to a broader audience
beyond my subfield. I think it has helped raise my public profile as a
scholar online.”
When Miller, of Santa Cruz, joined Academia.edu, he thought it was
a “justifiable dip-of-the-toe in the water of the social media world,”
because, like LinkedIn, Academia.edu seemed more sober and professional
than Facebook or Twitter.
He now uses the site to post information, to share items via other
social platforms, and occasionally to communicate with other users. His
Academia.edu profile has exceeded his expectations, with more than 1,550 profile views and about 4,650 document views.
“Some substantial part of those must have been new readers and
people who didn't know my work before, and with whom I might never have
had any contact,” he says.
And seasoned Academia.edu users have learned little tricks that
help make the site work for them. For example: Bledsoe, of Emory, has
found that tagging her papers generates greater traffic from search
engines.
For many scholars, Academia.edu isn’t just about exposure; it’s
about analytics. In addition to tracking the number of users reading and
downloading your articles, the site will tell you who’s searching for
you online. If you’re interested in the reach of your scholarship, this
can hold real appeal.
Miller has seen, through the analytics function, that his posts
are being viewed across the globe: in Iran, Algeria, Bangladesh,
Georgia, Romania, Indonesia, Turkey, India, Chile, and Macedonia in just
the past month.
“I've done a fair amount of work in post-socialist countries such
as Hungary and the Republic of Georgia, where scholars' access to
published materials may be uneven or restricted by past and present
collections and subscriptions,” he says. “I appreciate that Academia.edu
may be playing an important role in making more publications available
to scholars outside the hegemonic countries of North America and Western
Europe.”
With academic presses suffering from limited resources and
staffing, Academia.edu can also be helpful—if one can steer clear of
complaints from Elsevier—for scholars who want to promote books that
might otherwise go under-advertised.
Should You Share Your Research on Academia.edu?
Academia.edu’s motto, “share research,”
may sound like a godsend to scholars who want to do everything possible
to make sure their work echoes far beyond the ivory tower. The
pared-down social network lets users connect with colleagues, post their
own publications, and track the readership of their work—all without
having to dig through photographs of people’s cats and reactions to
whatever is on TV.
It’s a message with resonance, as the site’s growth bears out.
More than 7 million people have created academic profiles on the site,
says Richard Price, the company’s founder and CEO, with more than
800,000 joining each month. “Around 25 percent come back each month,” he
says, “which is a return rate comparable to Twitter’s.”
But the appeal of that motto is precisely what worries publishers like Elsevier,
the self-declared “leading provider of science and health information.”
Starting in late 2013, Elsevier began demanding that Academia.edu—and
institutions such as University of Calgary, University of
California-Irvine, and Harvard University—take down research
publications that, in many cases, authors had posted themselves.
As the Washington Post
recently reported: “The takedown campaign goes against a long-standing
industry practice in which journal publishers look the other way when
academics post their own work.”
Price told the Post in December that Academia.edu, which had previously gotten one or two takedown requests
a week, had received 2,800 in the span of a few weeks. Two months
later, Price says, the takedown notices have stopped, and he isn’t sure
whether they will return.
The takedown process might sound familiar to scholars who recall
the entertainment industry’s campaign against copyright violations on
YouTube and on file-sharing networks. First Academia.edu receives a
takedown request citing the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA). Then staff members remove the paper and notify the author
that his or her work has been taken down.
There’s generally no additional action taken against the author,
and there is an opportunity for appeal. “The DMCA framework allows the
author to counter-file if they would like,” Price says. “There is a form
they have to fill in to do that.”
Even when Academia.edu was receiving 2,800 requests, it was a
small percentage of the more than 2.3 million papers on Academia.edu.
But it’s cause for concern for academics who are drawn to the site
precisely because it promises to disseminate their research. If you’re
posting your work on Academia.edu now, should you stop? Or change your
standards for what makes it onto your profile page?
That depends on whom you ask. Tyrus Miller,
vice provost and dean of graduate studies at University of California,
joined Academia.edu in November 2012. Like many academics, he advocates
“as broad a use of open-access publication and as broad a legal
construal of scholarly fair use as possible.” It’s too late for
Elsevier’s takedown demands to make a serious impact, he says: “The
genie is already way out of the bottle.”
Yet Miller advises against using the site to share brand-new
publications that aren’t open access. “I wouldn't, for instance, scan a
newly published book chapter in an edited volume and post it
immediately,” he says. “But I think after a year or so, a posting
probably boosts the prominence and prestige, perhaps even sales, of the
book, rather than taking them away.”
Unclear on whether your journal would sign off? You could always just ask. Before posting her papers, Jenny Bledsoe,
a Ph.D. student in English at Emory University, obtains permission from
journal staff. In her experience, journals are typically glad to allow
authors to post PDFs with proper credit and a link to the journal site.
“Journals sometimes specify a pre-print PDF rather than the
finished product as the appropriate document to share on Academia.edu,”
she says. “As Academia.edu grows in popularity, I think journals will
establish policies and guidelines for posting PDFs on the site.”
Remember: As Bledsoe points out, this is still murky territory.
Publishers, journals, and scholars are all feeling their way around.
James Elkins, chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, doesn’t think scholars should
worry too much about takedown demands. He points to the website Scribd, which bills itself as “the world's largest digital library.”
“I post everything, including, in some cases, entire books, and I
have never seen evidence that those postings have hurt sales or that the
material has been plagiarized,” he says. “Scribd has several high-level
partnerships”—with publishers that include HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster—“and yet the same site doesn't police people who upload other people's work and charge for it!”
Elkins, who is currently editing a Penn State University Press
book series, tells a story to demonstrate the challenges of cracking
down on online content distribution. Last year, a week after he received
his first advance copy of a volume in the series, he saw a full PDF
available for free on the site aaaaarg.org.
The PDF was an uncorrected proof, which Elkins interpreted to mean that
someone at the press had leaked it. But when he emailed the editor to
express concern, she said she was unable to log on to the site.
“The difficulty the Penn State employee had, and—I assume—the fact
that they didn't pursue the matter, shows me how disconnected some
publishers are from the digital world, and therefore how unlikely it is
that any publisher or content provider will effectively police the many
illegal uploads,” Elkins says.
'Like a Newspaper'
There’s a broader question here, though: If you’re not using (or are barely using) Academia.edu, should you start?
Elkins may be the right person to ask. He appears to be one of the
scholars with the most visibility on Academia.edu, and he recommends it
widely—even though he briefly quit the site in 2009. “I no longer use
this site,” he posted at the time, because Academia.edu “is too slow,
too limited in its interactions, and awkwardly formatted for messages.
(And is an ‘I like’ with a star really a good thing for an academic
site?)”
But in 2010, he joined again, and he now receives about 100
notifications every day from Academia.edu about colleagues subscribing
to his feed, reading his publications, or posting their own research.
He’s even decided to stop monitoring his LinkedIn page,
despite a network of 2,500 connections. He now dismisses LinkedIn as
“mainly for white-collar workers looking for jobs, who need
introductions to people because they feel they can't write directly to
prospective employers,” and he is disappointed with what he views as a
lack of active and central scholars on the site.
A disclaimer on his LinkedIn profile directs readers to, among other profiles, his Academia.edu page.
Academia.edu keeps track of pageview stats, so Elkins knows that his
profile has received nearly 40,000 views, and that the papers he has
posted have received more than 125,000. Those readers also tend to be
active users of the site, which helps Elkins stay informed about
developments in his field. “I use Academia.edu like a newspaper,” he
says.
Numbers like those are enough to convince many scholars looking to develop an audience. Heidi Campbell,
associate professor of communication at Texas A&M University, is
among them. Don’t jump on to Academia.edu expecting to find vibrant
discussions or active networkers, she says. Think of it instead as a
“great way to share my work and let others know about my scholarship.”
“While it has not been that useful for me as a social-networking
tool or for building collaborations,” she says, “it offers some great
features that have spread the word about my work to a broader audience
beyond my subfield. I think it has helped raise my public profile as a
scholar online.”
When Miller, of Santa Cruz, joined Academia.edu, he thought it was
a “justifiable dip-of-the-toe in the water of the social media world,”
because, like LinkedIn, Academia.edu seemed more sober and professional
than Facebook or Twitter.
He now uses the site to post information, to share items via other
social platforms, and occasionally to communicate with other users. His
Academia.edu profile has exceeded his expectations, with more than 1,550 profile views and about 4,650 document views.
“Some substantial part of those must have been new readers and
people who didn't know my work before, and with whom I might never have
had any contact,” he says.
And seasoned Academia.edu users have learned little tricks that
help make the site work for them. For example: Bledsoe, of Emory, has
found that tagging her papers generates greater traffic from search
engines.
For many scholars, Academia.edu isn’t just about exposure; it’s
about analytics. In addition to tracking the number of users reading and
downloading your articles, the site will tell you who’s searching for
you online. If you’re interested in the reach of your scholarship, this
can hold real appeal.
Miller has seen, through the analytics function, that his posts
are being viewed across the globe: in Iran, Algeria, Bangladesh,
Georgia, Romania, Indonesia, Turkey, India, Chile, and Macedonia in just
the past month.
“I've done a fair amount of work in post-socialist countries such
as Hungary and the Republic of Georgia, where scholars' access to
published materials may be uneven or restricted by past and present
collections and subscriptions,” he says. “I appreciate that Academia.edu
may be playing an important role in making more publications available
to scholars outside the hegemonic countries of North America and Western
Europe.”
With academic presses suffering from limited resources and
staffing, Academia.edu can also be helpful—if one can steer clear of
complaints from Elsevier—for scholars who want to promote books that
might otherwise go under-advertised.
Should You Share Your Research on Academia.edu?
research,” may sound like a godsend to scholars who want to do
everything possible to make sure their work echoes far beyond the ivory tower.
The pared-down social network lets users connect with colleagues, post their
own publications, and track the readership of their work—all without having to
dig through photographs of people’s cats and reactions to whatever is on TV.
It’s a message with resonance, as the site’s growth bears out. More than 7
million people have created academic profiles on the site, says Richard Price,
the company’s founder and CEO, with more than 800,000 joining each month.
“Around 25 percent come back each month,” he says, “which is a return rate
comparable to Twitter’s.”
But the appeal of that motto is precisely what worries publishers like Elsevier, the self-declared
“leading provider of science and health information.” Starting in late 2013,
Elsevier began demanding that Academia.edu—and institutions such as University
of Calgary, University of California-Irvine, and Harvard University—take down
research publications that, in many cases, authors had posted themselves.
As the Washington Post recently reported: “The
takedown campaign goes against a long-standing industry practice in which
journal publishers look the other way when academics post their own work.”
Price told the Post in December that Academia.edu, which had
previously gotten one or two takedown
requests a week, had received 2,800 in the span of a few weeks. Two
months later, Price says, the takedown notices have stopped, and he isn’t sure
whether they will return.
The takedown process might sound familiar to scholars who recall the
entertainment industry’s campaign against copyright violations on YouTube and
on file-sharing networks. First Academia.edu receives a takedown request citing
the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Then staff members
remove the paper and notify the author that his or her work has been taken down.
There’s generally no additional action taken against the author, and there
is an opportunity for appeal. “The DMCA framework allows the author to
counter-file if they would like,” Price says. “There is a form they have to
fill in to do that.”
Even when Academia.edu was receiving 2,800 requests, it was a small
percentage of the more than 2.3 million papers on Academia.edu. But it’s cause
for concern for academics who are drawn to the site precisely because it
promises to disseminate their research. If you’re posting your work on
Academia.edu now, should you stop? Or change your standards for what makes it
onto your profile page?
That depends on whom you ask. Tyrus
Miller, vice provost and dean of graduate studies at University of
California, joined Academia.edu in November 2012. Like many academics, he
advocates “as broad a use of open-access publication and as broad a legal
construal of scholarly fair use as possible.” It’s too late for Elsevier’s
takedown demands to make a serious impact, he says: “The genie is already way
out of the bottle.”
Yet Miller advises against using the site to share brand-new publications
that aren’t open access. “I wouldn't, for instance, scan a newly published book
chapter in an edited volume and post it immediately,” he says. “But I think
after a year or so, a posting probably boosts the prominence and prestige,
perhaps even sales, of the book, rather than taking them away.”
Unclear on whether your journal would sign off? You could always just ask.
Before posting her papers, Jenny
Bledsoe, a Ph.D. student in English at Emory University, obtains
permission from journal staff. In her experience, journals are typically glad
to allow authors to post PDFs with proper credit and a link to the journal
site.
“Journals sometimes specify a pre-print PDF rather than the finished product
as the appropriate document to share on Academia.edu,” she says. “As
Academia.edu grows in popularity, I think journals will establish policies and
guidelines for posting PDFs on the site.”
Remember: As Bledsoe points out, this is still murky territory. Publishers,
journals, and scholars are all feeling their way around.
James Elkins, chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago, doesn’t think scholars should worry too much
about takedown demands. He points to the website Scribd,
which bills itself as “the world's largest digital library.”
“I post everything, including, in some cases, entire books, and I have never
seen evidence that those postings have hurt sales or that the material has been
plagiarized,” he says. “Scribd has several high-level partnerships”—with
publishers that include HarperCollins
and Simon
& Schuster—“and yet the same site doesn't police people who
upload other people's work and charge for it!”
Elkins, who is currently editing a Penn State University Press book series,
tells a story to demonstrate the challenges of cracking down on online content
distribution. Last year, a week after he received his first advance copy of a
volume in the series, he saw a full PDF available for free on the site aaaaarg.org. The PDF was an
uncorrected proof, which Elkins interpreted to mean that someone at the press
had leaked it. But when he emailed the editor to express concern, she said she
was unable to log on to the site.
“The difficulty the Penn State employee had, and—I assume—the fact that they
didn't pursue the matter, shows me how disconnected some publishers are from
the digital world, and therefore how unlikely it is that any publisher or
content provider will effectively police the many illegal uploads,” Elkins
says.
'Like a Newspaper'
There’s a broader question here, though: If you’re not using (or are barely
using) Academia.edu, should you start?
Elkins may be the right person to ask. He appears to be one of the scholars
with the most visibility on Academia.edu, and he recommends it widely—even
though he briefly quit the site in 2009. “I no longer use this site,” he posted
at the time, because Academia.edu “is too slow, too limited in its
interactions, and awkwardly formatted for messages. (And is an ‘I like’ with a
star really a good thing for an academic site?)”
But in 2010, he joined again, and he now receives about 100 notifications
every day from Academia.edu about colleagues subscribing to his feed, reading
his publications, or posting their own research. He’s even decided to stop
monitoring his LinkedIn
page, despite a network of 2,500 connections. He now dismisses
LinkedIn as “mainly for white-collar workers looking for jobs, who need
introductions to people because they feel they can't write directly to
prospective employers,” and he is disappointed with what he views as a lack of
active and central scholars on the site.
A disclaimer on his LinkedIn profile directs readers to, among other profiles,
his Academia.edu page.
Academia.edu keeps track of pageview stats, so Elkins knows that his profile
has received nearly 40,000 views, and that the papers he has posted have
received more than 125,000. Those readers also tend to be active users of the
site, which helps Elkins stay informed about developments in his field. “I use
Academia.edu like a newspaper,” he says.
Numbers like those are enough to convince many scholars looking to develop
an audience. Heidi
Campbell, associate professor of communication at Texas A&M
University, is among them. Don’t jump on to Academia.edu expecting to find
vibrant discussions or active networkers, she says. Think of it instead as a
“great way to share my work and let others know about my scholarship.”
“While it has not been that useful for me as a social-networking tool or for
building collaborations,” she says, “it offers some great features that have
spread the word about my work to a broader audience beyond my subfield. I think
it has helped raise my public profile as a scholar online.”
When Miller, of Santa Cruz, joined Academia.edu, he thought it was a
“justifiable dip-of-the-toe in the water of the social media world,” because,
like LinkedIn, Academia.edu seemed more sober and professional than Facebook or
Twitter.
He now uses the site to post information, to share items via other social
platforms, and occasionally to communicate with other users. His Academia.edu profile has
exceeded his expectations, with more than 1,550 profile views and about 4,650
document views.
“Some substantial part of those must have been new readers and people who
didn't know my work before, and with whom I might never have had any contact,”
he says.
And seasoned Academia.edu users have learned little tricks that help make
the site work for them. For example: Bledsoe, of Emory, has found that tagging
her papers generates greater traffic from search engines.
For many scholars, Academia.edu isn’t just about exposure; it’s about
analytics. In addition to tracking the number of users reading and downloading
your articles, the site will tell you who’s searching for you online. If you’re
interested in the reach of your scholarship, this can hold real appeal.
Miller has seen, through the analytics function, that his posts are being
viewed across the globe: in Iran, Algeria, Bangladesh, Georgia, Romania,
Indonesia, Turkey, India, Chile, and Macedonia in just the past month.
“I've done a fair amount of work in post-socialist countries such as Hungary
and the Republic of Georgia, where scholars' access to published materials may
be uneven or restricted by past and present collections and subscriptions,” he
says. “I appreciate that Academia.edu may be playing an important role in
making more publications available to scholars outside the hegemonic countries
of North America and Western Europe.”
With academic presses suffering from limited resources and staffing,
Academia.edu can also be helpful—if one can steer clear of complaints from
Elsevier—for scholars who want to promote books that might otherwise go
under-advertised.
Want to swap strategies and share insights with
other academics?
Sign up for Vitae and join the conversation in one of our new discussion
groups: Adjunct Life, Flexible Academics, On Scholarly Writing,
or Advising in Academia.
other academics?
Sign up for Vitae and join the conversation in one of our new discussion
groups: Adjunct Life, Flexible Academics, On Scholarly Writing,
or Advising in Academia.
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