Any experience of publishing on Academia.edu?

[TressiliansStone]

Has anyone published papers on this site? Are there any issues to be aware of, eg re copyright?

I'm writing a monograph on a local history topic – originally for friends and family, but it seems to be getting quite interesting and I think it will be useful to others.

I don't have my own website or WordPress, and one of the sources I'm citing is actually an unpublished paper on Academia.edu (a professional academic sharing some of her archive findings). So I wondered if it might be suitable.

I don't see why you shouldn't use it.

Usually, we'd publish a paper in a journal, or publish a book with a press, then we might upload a version of that to academia.edu so that it can be easily accessed. In most cases there are rules about how you do this so that you don't get into trouble with the journal over copyright (you upload a pre-publication copy, not the nice neat one that the journal has copy edited).

But if you're not planning to publish your book anywhere else, you'd have no issues.

The copyright would belong to you, but in real terms it'd be fairly easy for someone to nick it. I don't think there's any way to protect against that.

Thank you, that's helpful.

It sounds like Academia.edu is considered respectable, then, and won't attempt to claim the copyright for themselves, as some websites might (I'm really struggling to find anything about this on their site)?

I deleted my Academia.edu account a couple of years back after reading this about it's ropey business practices/ethicswww.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2017/01/23/dear-scholars-delete-your-account-at-academia-edu/#cef2cd82d628

Sorry, messed up the URL: www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2017/01/23/dear-scholars-delete-your-account-at-academia-edu/#cef2cd82d628

Oh, interesting. And interesting that she's also a historian, rather than say a scientist.

Yeah, whenever one publishes, someone, somewhere must be paying for that. The question of who, and what the currency is, is what has changed in my lifetime.

I'm a bit puzzled that she's so cross that Academia is a for-profit company.

Elsevier and other science publishers are mostly for-profit, aren't they? That's their business model, surely?

Isn't it pretty normal (though not exclusively so) in areas where research frequently leads to products & services people are prepared to pay for – rather than research for the good of our soul, so to speak?

I'm always very cautious about how personal data is used, and the devil is in the detail when it comes to how research output gets owned and used, but I'm not per se against the publisher paying their bills by flogging their publication. It's a centuries-old model...

Frankly, MN monetises my contributions here good luck to them there.

But academia.edu isn't really a publisher?

I think that's the point.

The site bills itself as a place where you can upload publications so other people can access them freely. That's an altruistic goal; so when it diverges from that, you can understand people feeling it's dishonest.

Academia.edu doesn't offer any of the services a publisher typically offers, so it is dishonest to then try to charge people for nothing.

This is all making me really think!

Last year I was chatting to a very lovely professional writer, with whom I was sharing some hobby-research results, who described me as "generous" with my research and suggested I think in terms of monetising my output – blog or own website with advertising where I get a share, trad book, whatever. She was also scrupulous about offering to pay for whatever research she commissioned from me.

This was quite a shock(!) I'm not used to thinking in these terms for my hobby material. It's usually more the other way round – I would expect either to have to pay directly for my own publishing/hosting, or uneasily accept the trade-off of the social media model.

In that model, the hoster (be it MN or Facebook or Ancestry) just takes my content and/or my personal data as payment and monetises it for themselves by selling advertising space or the data itself, and their income can be any level from just keeping the servers on, to vast fortunes (data is the new oil, doncha know).

Then there's the academic model of funding by grants and institutions. That pays for the content. Who pays for publishing/hosting? Well an institution could pay the costs of hosting online, but when it comes to putting ink on paper that's a cost that has to be recouped by charging the reader (or the institution again via the library budget).

There's also the model of commercial publishing: the publisher pays for the content, may add value in the form of editing/illustrations, then pays for the cost of printing/hosting/distribution. They recoup these costs by charging readers.

Wikipedia: doesn't pay for content. Does pay for hosting. Doesn't charge the reader but asks for charitable contributions. AFAIK doesn't host ads or sell personal data.

Hmm, 'scuse me pondering out loud here. This is helping me think more about this landscape, and where I want to sit within it.

Also as you so rightly say, it's pretty easy to nick work wherever it's published.

I have a feeling that publishing through a formal hoster/publisher (even if it adds nothing in the way of editing or graphic design) may benefit me more than entirely self-publishing. It provides a well-evidenced publication date so I can demonstrate precedence. I should also be looking for somewhere that offers click-of-a-button citation formats, to incline users of my work towards acknowledging me rather than omitting it as a chore through sheer laziness.

Need to contemplate further whether Academia.edu fits the bill...

Ironically, the monograph is about historical local publishers...

There are 2 issues for academics in a standard university setting when dealing with academics.edu.: First is the ethics of academia.edu, which started out luring us in as a free and open site to share our work but has become increasingly predatory, always spamming with sales emails, trying to marketise its users etc. I used to use it a lot and now I don't put anything up there, only on my institutional repository. I just got fed up with being constantly spammed with messages trying to persuade me to pay them to publicise my work more - it all feels really dodgy, and a long way from an open exchange of ideas. There are other sites like research gate alternatively, which seem to be a bit less aggressive in trying to sell stuff.

Separately, most academics won't "publish" on academia.edu, just use it as a way of sharing pre-publication versions of work that is published elsewhere. Because there is no quality control or peer review on academia.edu and so a publication there doesn't mean anything in career terms as our publications only "count" if they've been through peer review. However it is a good way of sharing work widely if you don't mind the way the site works.

OP, what about Humanities Commons CORE?
hcommons.org/core/

I was looking for a preprint archive (arXiv) for the humanities but there doesn't seem to be one. The above looks like the next best bet, and seems legit (nonprofit, attached to real academic organisation, etc.)

This is so helpful, thank you all.

I've just taken a look, and Humanities Commons CORE already has a paper discussing in passing one of my historical publishers, so it would fit in nicely, content-wise.

Guess my chatty little history will need some tightening up, tone-wise, if I'm to play with the big girls and boys!

Actually, seeing as I've got you folk here... My piece is looking like it'll be approx 7000 words before appendices and footnotes, and 40,000 words including those. I think PhD theses are often around 10,000, so I'm assuming my piece constitutes a readable length for a paper?

PhD theses are 80,000 words, not 10,000 words.

Ah, good, mine's short in comparison, then.

As above, academia.edu is supposed to be a free site allowing academics to make their work accessible to everyone. There is a need for such sites as academic publishers are very predatory and charge an enormous amount of money because of an outdated system and prestige that counts towards research assessment. Academia bagged the .edu domain before laws were introduced to stop companies from doing so, which gives the appearance of an educational institution but is in fact a for profit company.

Other options include researchgate or discipline specific hosts, e.g, I also use philpapers.

For all of these I would be tempted to say that someone had uploaded their work there, rather than publish it. For publication I would expect some discriminatory process like peer review, which these sites do not have (philpapers only accepts published articles, but the others accept pretty much anything).

In my discipline a PhD is typically 70-90 thousand words, but most of that is text and very little is footnotes and bibliography. Appendices are very rare.

Guess my chatty little history will need some tightening up, tone-wise, if I'm to play with the big girls and boys!

No, it won't - you can upload anything you like to academia.edu. That's the point of it.

It doesn't have to fit any standard at all, including length. I would find 40k a rather unaccustomed length as it's too long for an article or a MA thesis and too short for a PhD or a monograph, but it doesn't matter.