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Open Access Scholarship

Critical Assessments of Research Gate, Academia.edu, Mendeley

These articles provide a critical assessment (a few are positive) of "social networking" academic sites, like Academia.edu and ResearchGate.

Why should I use Academic Works when I have Academia.edu?

The following text was written by Jill Cirasella of the CUNY Grad Center, and was originally posted here.

Why You Should Ditch Academia.edu and Use CUNY Academic Works

CUNY recently launched Academic Works, an open access repository that is the ideal way for you to make articles, book chapters, data, etc. available to your research community and the broader public.

Why should you care about Academic Works?  Let’s start with three key reasons:

  • Academic Works is the perfect place to satisfy grant funders’ open access and open data requirements. If you want more grants in the future, you need to learn how to comply with funders’ requirements for openness!

  • Academia.edu and ResearchGate.net are seriously suboptimal. First, they’re commercial sites. (Yep, despite its URL, which it never should have gotten, Academia.edu is not connected to any educational institution.) And commercial ventures might disappear at any time (taking your papers offline too), whereas Academic Works is designed to last for the long term, longer than commercial sites and longer than personal websites. They’re also much more likely to be smacked with (and blindly comply with) take-down notices from publishers. And, as commercial entities, they exist to make money. How do they do that? By forcing users to log in to see documents, tracking their actions, and selling that data. If you’re uncomfortable with how Facebook commodifies your information, you should be uncomfortable with Academia.edu and ResearchGate too!