By Andrew Klein

Date: August 2026

To the Academic Community, Researchers, and Scholars Everywhere:

I am writing this letter to explain a decision I have made with care and finality: I will no longer submit papers to Academia.edu. I am withdrawing my work and my support from this platform.

I do not make this decision lightly. Academia.edu presents itself as a noble mission—a platform to accelerate research and accelerate the distribution of the world’s knowledge. Its founder, Richard Price, a British entrepreneur and Oxford graduate, launched the site in 2008 after raising $600,000 from London-based venture capitalists. It has grown to host more than 55 million articles and support over 300 million researchers. On the surface, this seems commendable.

But a platform is not its mission statement. A platform is its practices. And the practices of Academia.edu are predatory, extractive, and corrosive to the integrity of academic work .

The “Shark Tank” Reality

Academia.edu is not a non-profit steward of knowledge. It is a for-profit company built on a “Shark Tank” model. The “sharks” are venture capitalists. The “entrepreneurs” are academics. And the “product” is our research, our data, and our identities.

The platform’s goal is not to distribute knowledge freely. It is to amass a user base, extract data, and monetize both. This is not a critique of capitalism. It is a statement of fact, supported by the platform’s own practices and the documented experiences of thousands of users.

The History of Exploitation

Academia.edu’s history is one of incremental expansion of its power over users. The platform started as a simple repository. Over time, it introduced Premium subscriptions, then aggressive auto-renewal policies, then significant and unannounced price increases . Users report being charged hundreds of dollars without warning, only to be met with copy-pasted refusals from customer support .

In September 2025, the platform introduced new Terms of Service that crossed a fundamental line. These terms grant Academia.edu a “worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license” to use your Member Content and your personal information, including your name, voice, signature, photograph, and likeness, “in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting” . This is not a licence to host your work. This is a licence to own it. This includes the right to create derivative works, such as AI-generated podcasts, and to sell the rights to your research and professional identity without further compensation or notification.

The Consequences

This is not an abstract concern. It is a material threat to academic freedom. As scholars, we are already subject to the pressures of “academic capitalism”—the market-driven evaluation of research impact, often measured by questionable altmetrics . Platforms like Academia.edu amplify these pressures by commodifying reputation and creating a system where self-promotion is not just encouraged but monetized.

The platform’s billing practices are predatory by design, targeting the most vulnerable: students and early-career researchers who sign up for a trial and are trapped in a cycle of auto-renewal and opaque charges . The platform’s Terms of Service are draconian, granting it rights over our work that no ethical publisher would demand . And its response to legitimate complaints is to ignore them, hoping that users will give up .

The Alternative

There are better places. Non-profit repositories like Zenodo and Figshare, and community-driven platforms like Humanities Commons, are built to preserve and share research without commercial exploitation. We do not need to surrender our work to Silicon Valley venture capitalists to advance knowledge. We can do it ourselves, without the sharks.

My Decision

I am withdrawing my papers from Academia.edu. I am deleting my account. I will not be part of a system that treats scholars as products and research as inventory. This is not a protest. It is a refusal to participate in a fundamentally exploitative arrangement.

I urge my colleagues to do the same. Not out of anger, but out of principle. If we value the integrity of our work, we cannot entrust it to a platform that values only its own growth.

Signed,

Andrew Klein

August 2026

“We are not measured by what we lost, but by what we carried.”

— Quintus Rex