I Am No Longer On academia.edu
academia.edu has introduced new terms of service allowing them to use your Member Content and your personal information, including your name , voice, signature (!), photograph, and likeness, for any purpose forever. That is clearly a proposal to let them generate fake podcasts or videos of you talking about your work, powered by bullshit generators. To delete your account next time you log in, click “privacy policy,” then put your mouse over your username in the upper right, then click “account settings”: and” and look for the option to delete.
By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license, permission, and consent for Academia.edu to use your Member Content and your personal information (including, but not limited to, your name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness, city, institutional affiliations, citations, mentions, publications, and areas of interest) in any manner, including for the purpose of advertising, selling, or soliciting the use or purchase of Academia.edu’s Services.
https://www.academia.edu/terms
Academia was popular with scholars in ancient world studies and Assyriology, so I used it by default but never uploaded any papers after my MA.
James Bailie recommends Knowledge Commons hcommons.org as a place to host your papers which is run by scholars not shareholders and respects your rights.
If you are comfortable with programming gems, Ryan Baumann has a tool to download from the site without logging in and agreeing to the new terms of service. https://github.com/ryanfb/academia-dl
academia.edu is well known for spamming you and for making aggressive claims to anything you upload to it. Sarah Emily Bond already warned about it in 2017. And remember the last pre-war Dutch census!
(scheduled 18 September 2025)
