For Academia.edu, numbers matter.
Numbers are how the website promotes itself — more than 29 million registered users have posted more than eight million academic papers to the site, the “about” page boasts — and numbers are how the site makes money.
Despite its domain name, Academia.edu is not an educational institution. It is a for-profit company, but it doesn’t charge academics to post or read research. So far, it has been funded by venture capital and job ads, and its success depends on its large user base.
But its business model makes some academics uncomfortable.
‘Academia.edu and platforms like that are kind of piggybacking off a public university system, but they’re doing nothing to sustain it.’
“Academia.edu and platforms like that are kind of piggybacking off a public university system, but they’re doing nothing to sustain it,” said Gary Hall, a professor of media and performing arts at Coventry University and co-founder of Open Humanities Press.
Mr. Hall is part of a small but influential group of doubters. He’s concerned that Academia.edu is profiting from academics’ free labor, and he worries that one company controls access to so much scholarly research.
He plans to speak next week about his concerns at a Coventry University panel discussion called “Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu?”
In academic publishing the relationship between scholars and for-profit companies is tense. When for-profit companies control access to research, some worry that scholars’ goals — producing knowledge and deepening existing knowledge — will suffer. Over the past three years more than 15,000 researchers have pledged to boycott the for-profit publisher Elsevier, and in October the editorial staff of Lingua, one of Elsevier’s journals, resigned en masse.
If companies like Elsevier are catching flak, why not Academia.edu?
As Mr. Hall sees it, Academia.edu is profiting from the work of scholars and the resources of the university system without contributing anything in return.
“It’s not funding research,” he said. “It’s not funding universities. It’s inserting itself as an intermediary.”
On his website Mr. Hall argues that Academia.edu’s revenue model depends on its ability to exploit user data. The description for the panel discussion makes the same claim.
Originally that seemed to be the company’s plan. “The goal is to provide trending research data to R&D institutions that can improve the quality of their decisions by 10-20 percent,” Richard Price, the company’s chief executive, told Scientific American in 2012.
But while it’s true that Academia.edu once considered the strategy, the company ended up deciding against it. “We floated that idea once,” Mr. Price said in an interview. “It’s not something we’re doing right now.”
The Search for a Revenue Model
At the moment, the company employs user data only to match job ads and papers with users who might be interested in them. Mr. Price said that the company was considering new revenue models but that they haven’t been announced yet.
“The primary goal of the company is to build an open platform for sharing academic research,” he said. “The second priority is to find a revenue model that’s consistent with the first priority.”
Mr. Price likened his company to Google. Google offers a free service, yet it depends on its users for revenue. “One shouldn’t be churlish and say Google shouldn’t exist,” he said.
Concerns over the company’s for-profit status are unfounded, Mr. Price said. When companies like Google make an impact on the world, most people don’t discount them because they’re for profit, he argued. So why can’t a for-profit company create a platform that serves academics’ goals?
“‘Monetize’ is not a for-profit word,” he said.
And like Google, he added, Academia.edu is better off as a commercial company. With the restrictions of a nonprofit, companies would have much less freedom, and growth would be much harder.
Academia.edu is certainly growing. The site, founded in 2008, gets more than 36 million unique visitors a month, and it says that papers on the site receive a 73-percent boost in citations over five years.
But what if it gets too big? Some researchers are concerned that if it keeps growing, it will dominate the market.
“I’ve heard many careful, thoughtful academics note that they’re sharing their work there because that’s where everybody is,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association, wrote on her website.
Ms. Fitzpatrick, who will appear on the Coventry panel with Mr. Hall, worries that Academia.edu will become mandatory for academics. Once enough people start using it, she reasoned, others may feel obligated to sign up. Soon, she said, it might be difficult for alternative platforms to develop.
Academia.edu is like Facebook, she wrote. Many of those who dislike Facebook still use the site. They don’t want to, but they feel as if they have to.
“Everything that’s wrong with Facebook is wrong with Academia.edu, at least just up under the surface,” she wrote, “and so perhaps we should think twice before committing our professional lives to it.”
Others worry that the website doesn’t allow for enough input from academics.
“We don’t have any control over what’s happening,” said Martin Eve, a director of the Open Library of the Humanities.
Mr. Eve thinks that academics should use the site to disseminate their work more broadly — as long as they use other platforms, too.
But Mr. Price said he doesn’t want Academia.edu to dominate. “I’m hopeful that in the future there are going to be lots of platforms for academics to be using,” he said. “And they’re going to be keeping each other on their toes.”
Correction (12/2/2015, 1:20 p.m.): Because of a miscommunication, this article originally misquoted Richard Price. He said, “One shouldn’t be churlish and say Google shouldn’t exist,” not “One shouldn’t be childish and say Google shouldn’t exist.” The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
