The Day I Removed my Publications from Academia & Research Gate

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Well, this is it. I have decided to remove all my publications from Academia and Research Gate (and no, I will not insert a link to those sites).

Sometimes, there are things you’ve been wanting to do for a long time, but you didn’t feel like it, or you were a bit afraid of the consequences [1]. In my case, I thought that I didn’t have the choice as a PhD student; I’ve been told that I need to be visible online and that scholars love those platforms for their simplicity and their ergonomy. I thought that if my community uses Academia and Research Gate, I had to follow their rules in order to be (accepted as / regarded as) a full member of this community. It is true that for many young scholars who do not have access to a page of the websites of their universities, Academia and Research Gate offer simple ways to publicly present your research.

And then I realized: no. I don’t have to. I can, because it looks like it makes things easier and because it boosts your narcissistic ego – oh, I’ve been downloaded x times! But you don’t have to, and you shouldn’t, for many, many reasons that can’t be compiled in a single blog post (and that have already been listed in excellent articles such as Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu or Delete your academia.edu account… (there are other ways to share your work)). The trigger on this ordinary day was the small add-on Academia, suggesting me for the umpteenth time to create a personal website, while I don’t want to, don’t need to create one. And I thought: Why do Academia and Research Gate always make me feel like I could be missing out on something (a reference related to my work, maybe even a reference citing my work) or like I’m not doing enough?

Because this is the way modern consumerism and free market work:

  • by creating artificial needs (reading this paper, knowing who downloaded your document, having your personal website);
  • and by fostering competition between social actors (publishing more, always, more, always).

Academia and Research Gate pretend they promote open access [2]But what they really promote is making money out of our work (this article explains their business model). They encourage looking at ratings and impact factors – all things that do not necessarily say a lot about the quality of your research, especially when you don’t publish exclusively in English (and when you’re just beginning). They make distinctions between categories of scholars: the premium feature for instance allows you to know who downloaded your work, thus introducing the pernicious idea that some downloads are more valuable than others. As Sarah Bond asks in her article Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu:

Are we supposed to somehow value that a full professor looked at our work over, say, an adjunct?

Academia and Research Gate are inherently unfair to everyone:

  • to researchers whose work, freely produced and, more importantly, overwhelmingly with public funds, is used for commercial purposes;
  • to institutions who hosted research, made it happen, and yet have no way to collect information on their own (!) researchers (the open archive HAL-SHS, on the other hand, makes it possible for universities, research centers, etc., to aggregate the work written by their researchers, to produce for instance the publication list of the members of a given lab);
  • to users (scholars or not) who often have no clue on how to cite the downloaded paper since Academia and Research Gate do not care at all about metadata (e.g. the date, the pages, the journal, etc.).

This might seem that things that you’ve heard before – to be honest, I knew all that, but I was trying to make sense of my cognitive dissonance, defined on Wikipedia as “the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values”. I knew that the interests pursued by Academia and Research Gate (basically, making a profit) were not aligned with my values (sharing knowledge and, let’s be honest, making my scientific contribution visible), but I had come to convince myself that it was necessary — as a young scholar trying to make her way in academia (with a small a).

Yet it is precisely as a young scholar that I should not accept this capitalistic logic at the very beginning of my career, even if it means that my work will be less read, less cited, less recognized, maybe. I truly believe we should not subject research to the market forces, and while this might seem a (very) naive perspective given the current budget cuts (see for instance, in France), I just want to do my part. I am not judging anyone who uses Academia and Research Gate; I just want to make you aware that other solutions exist.

Last but not least, I have not deleted my account on Academia, but only removed all the papers (I deleted my account of Research Gate, though, because it kept assigning me papers I have written although I had removed them from my profile). Why is that? I hope that open access can potentially spread even more if I upload a statement directly on those platforms explaining why I won’t upload my publications there anymore:

Screenshot of my profile on Academia.edu on 21 March 2018

[Update 11.10.2020: In the meantime, I have fully deleted my account.]

I really hope that many will join the open access movement, but far, far away from Academia and Research Gate. I already feel like I’m reacting a bit late, but I feel kind of relieved to finally take that first step.

I strongly encourage you to upload your work on HAL-SHS, where your research (published or not) will be protected and linked to you as a single person, even when you change affiliations (especially useful given the temporary positions everyone gets those days…). I have also heard that Zenodo can be a good alternative (this article even explains how to migrate your papers from Academia to Zenodo).

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!


[1] After a quick search on Twitter, I realized that I wasn’t the only one who needed some time, though. Even Sarah Bond, who initiated the debate, posted on 20 January 2017: “It took me a long time to get here but the only place I’ll be putting my work from now on is @UILibraries repository”.

[2] “Academia’s mission is to make every scholarly and scientific paper available for free on the internet”, https://www.academia.edu/upgrade?feature=searchm&from_navbar=true, accessed on 14 March 2018.

References: 

Bond, Sarah, 2017 (23 January). “Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu”, https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2017/01/23/dear-scholars-delete-your-account-at-academia-edu/#66f814902d62, accessed on 21 March 2018.

Elden, Stuart, 2014 (24 January). “Delete your academia.edu account… (there are other ways to share your work)”, https://progressivegeographies.com/2017/01/24/delete-your-academia-edu-account-there-are-other-ways-to-share-your-work/, accessed on 21 March 2018.

Gruber, Ethan, 2017 (23 January). “Open Access, Academia.edu, And Why I’m All-In on Zenodo.org”, http://numismatics.org/pocketchange/open-access-academia-edu-and-why-im-all-in-on-zenodo-org/, accessed on 21 March 2018.

Maly, Ico, 2017 (26 April). “The end of Academia.edu: how business takes over, again”, https://www.diggitmagazine.com/column/end-academiaedu-how-business-takes-over-again, accessed on 21 March 2018.

Cite this article as: Naomi Truan, "The Day I Removed my Publications from Academia & Research Gate," in Ici et là, 21/03/2018, https://icietla.hypotheses.org/114.

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13 Responses

  1. Allen Razdow says:

    Sure, but why do none of the 1,000 articles against these sites talk about “legit” research publishers? Elsevier earns a billion pounds in profits and is known for aggressive copyright practices. Peer review has value, but also helps perpetuate a cabal of taxpayer subsidized institutions that pay high subscription prices to high profit publishers. This constitutes a much larger social-network-for-profit than any of the sites being trashed here. How the NSF and NIH came to be lining the pockets of publishers who sequester research out of reach of the public is beyond me.

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    You are a very bright individual!

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  10. Paul Ernest says:

    Dear Naomi, I read your article with interest, and admire your principles stand. Yes, I agree with the critique that Academia & Research Gate are someone’s bright ideas for commercially exploiting researchers’ work and desires for recognition. So many modern internet apps or platforms are based on this idea, from Uber, Amazon to Facebook and Instagram. Having been with both Academia & Research Gate for years I have seen the increasingly overt commercialism creeping in, wanting me to upgrade to Premium (i.e. a paid account) to better and more directly monetize my work and desire to know of others’ interest in my work. There are worse exploiters, like Lambert publishing. I also get approached monthly if not weekly by new paid for journals, where authors have to pay to publish (I took my name off the editorial board list when I realized authors had to pay). There are also a growing number of scam conferences that claim to desire my partcicpation after noticing just one publication of mine. These are all actvities parasitic on academic work. On the other hand, I have found both Academia & Research Gate useful for joining virtual communities of scholars and inded have had valuable discussions and critiques about papers in progress that I have uploaded for that purpose. So it is a matter of balance – what can I gain and how can I avoid the most obvious traps of exploitation? But then I am a retired tenured career academic of full professor status with little at stake. I suppose it can be said that by participation one is contributing to the exploitation of others. I shall check out the sites you mention and see if the same features are freely available. I am too aware of the drift of academia and research publications (that’s lower case academia and research) towards a fully commercialised market model, and the proletarianisation of academic work, paid by pieceworks and with unrealistic targets. I thnak you for your valuable posting. Yours, Paul Ernest. As a PS I’ll upload something I wrote critiquing the system

    • Naomi Truan says:

      Thank you very much for your kind words, Paul! I do agree that Academia and Research Gate can be useful——this is actually the problem. If nobody used them, it would feel easy to quit them 😉 The one thing I miss about open repositories is the networking part, which I then found on Twitter. Combining open repositories (to archive my work and make it accessible to others) and Twitter as a professional and academic network has been the perfect combination for me.

  1. 02/06/2020

    […] extremely successful in community uptake from their inception, up to the extent that eventually, it left young scholars with the impression that they simply cannot afford not to use these platforms even though they were aware and against their politics. (Kudos for Naomi Truan, author of the above […]

  2. 25/07/2020

    […] Zum Hintergrund meiner Entscheidung hier eine Auswahl lesenswerter Blog-Beiträge (alle auf Englisch): Ethan Gruber: Open Access, Academia.edu, and why I’m all-in on Zenodo.org. Pocket Change. American Numismatists Society Blog (23.01.2017), http://numismatics.org/pocketchange/open-access-academia-edu-and-why-im-all-in-onzenodo-org/ Frank M. Richter: What should I do with my draft paper? Hide it, upload to Academia, or upload to Zenodo? Free Science Blog (24.02.2017), https://www.frankm-richter.de/freescienceblog/2017/02/24/what-should-what-do-i-do-with-my-draftpaper-hide-it-upload-to-academia-or-upload-to-zenodo/ Naomi Truan: The Day I Removed my Publications from Academia & Research Gate. Ici et lá (21.03.2018), https://icietla.hypotheses.org/114 […]

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