Post
If you still have an account on academia.edu, you should probably delete it.
I'm not sure how their new terms are legal: they give the site the right to use your data *in any manner*. This is mainly to help them scrape academic work and republish/mangle parts of it through AI without credit: but these terms go way beyond that into your likeness, your voice, even your signature.
Please boost this to academics you know. Further PSA elements in thread:
@JubalBarca sounds like a typical publication agreement from a commercial publisher (at least those from a decade ago). What’s missing is that they hold you liable for any damage caused to them by publishing your work.
@JubalBarca I just deleted my academia.edu account (or at least I think I did).
@JubalBarca what is academia.edu?
@elduvelle A sort of social network and repository for papers for academics, but run by a miserably venal commercial company that's increasingly a sea of AI and spam. That they have a .edu address is in itself an oddity from when the systems were first being set up.
@JubalBarca
They also write: "... you hereby grant to Academia.edu a worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, transferable license to exercise any and all rights under copyright, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, […] including the generation and hosting of Output and the use of AI to generate adaptations and other derivative works of Member Content, provided that the Member Content is not sold to a third party for a profit."
@JubalBarca But does deleting the account also void that license? 
And wow is that a fucked up clause in a contract. Handing something like this to non-lawyers should be illegal.
@JubalBarca sheesh, thanks for the heads up, that is just unacceptable on their part. Account is deleted.
@JubalBarca I’m not an academic but I would like to thank all of the scholars that published articles on this site. It was really amazingly helpful during my studies in #egyptology #archeology . (I’m adding the # hoping to give more visibility to the initial post).
@adelinej Yeah, we definitely need to find new and better places to ensure people do keep making open access work useable.
@JubalBarca FYI This shitfuckery is what you get once you sign in. No option to not accept the terms and delete your account. However if you click the link to the privacy policy you can get to your account settings and delete your account, but they don't make this clear.
@Ooze Yes, I included that a bit further downthread, didn't have space for it in the OP - it's deeply annoying!
@JubalBarca thank you for the heads-up and the how to delete without accepting the new policy notes.
Much like Researchgate, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but ultimately I found it utterly useless.
@xtaldave It's actually a PITA for me, because Georgian and Armenian academics often put papers up that are from obscure conference collections and just not available elsewhere.
But I need to start organising better on rectifying that.
@JubalBarca oh heck, I can see why that would be difficult.
The data-grab just seems unjustifiable to me.
@JubalBarca I'm not a legal scholar, or even particularly smart, but at least by my reading of concepts like "ideal rights" etc., as well as what I believe is a pretty global principle that a contract signee must be reasonably able to understand the consequences of the agreement, most of that can't possibly be legal...
@jwcph Yeah, a lot of these sorts of things kind of rely on the average user not having the nous, money, or reading time to challenge them, and the company having serious lawyer muscle, and the terms including a binding consent to arbitration so you can't easily sue them anyway.
@JubalBarca Wow! That’s so disturbing.
@JubalBarca
Bookmarking this for later, thanks for the heads up! I only have my Thesis up there, but I'm not ok with it being scraped, not to mention everything else you mentioned.
@JubalBarca do you have any idea how to get things which are only on academia.edu without an account? Its ubiquitous in ancient world studies.
@bookandswordblog @JubalBarca sorry to eavesdrop but this may be useful: https://github.com/ryanfb/academia-dl
Created by my friend @ryanfb 😁
@JubalBarca
Are you talking about Bluesky or Mastodon as well ?
@JubalBarca Thank you for posting this! I had missed your follow up about how to get around clicking Accept but I fumbled around and figured that trick out eventually, lol. Account now deleted!
@JubalBarca Look at Digital Ocean. They are the same, except someone had the misunderstanding they take the rights to your dev code. No, they acknowledge it as yours, but they lay claim to alot.
I only opened an account there a few days ago for research. I'm actually not sure I'll stay the duration of the free trial. I have better servers. 🤷♂️
@hologram Yes, in very strict terms Academia doesn't take the direct rights to your papers - but given we've invented automated paraphrase plagiarism, that's not a very useful guarantee any more in 2025.
@JubalBarca just to be clear, what I meant was that D.O. takes pretty much the same as Academia from you, but does not try to claim the rights to code that you might write there, while using their "laboratory".
but it's true, mainly in news coverage, "paraphrase plagiarism" is a product.
@JubalBarca thank you. Academia has become close to useless anyway
Further PSA 1, how to do account deletion on Academia.edu without agreeing to the new terms of service on the way:
If you want to delete your account, open academia.edu, do NOT click accept to the new terms, but instead click "privacy policy". You can then go to the top left dropdown menu with your name on it, click "account settings", scroll to the bottom of the page, and there's the account deletion option. You can even leave them a little note if you want though I doubt they'll read it.
@JubalBarca Thank you very much. I finally deleted my account after many years of it laying dormant
Further PSA 2, where do we go instead?
Probably the current best option is Knowledge Commons, which is run as a nonprofit and can be found at hcommons.org (they also run the hcommons.social mastodon server). Knowledge Commons gives you essentially the same profile-building tools as Academia with far less slop and more control over what's going on.
@JubalBarca We go back to hosting our own stuff on our own or our institutional servers.
@Ooze That's obviously an ideal option: some academics do lack funds or, for independent scholars, institutional access, and finding ways to make our own websites and institutions networked and visible is a challenge. All problems we can solve, I think, but it does need and deserve considerable effort.
@JubalBarca All these things are solved problems. The only hurdle to be overcome is the decision to do it.
This reminds me of when someone seriously argued that it would not be possible to run a conference if one didn't use Google docs, that other solutions were just not practical. I was like, we used to run conferences just fine before there were even computers.
It can easily be done. It just needs the will to do it.
@JubalBarca This is what I got when trying to delete.
@JubalBarca Interesting option. I did keep my Academia account, but gave them very little. I didn't show my face - they got almost nothing, I downloaded a few papers. No big deal.
Further PSA 3: Mitigations/Caveats to the above:
- Sites do need a rights clause to be able to share your posts.
- The rights clauses have two limiters: first, you grant rights "in connection with operating and providing the Services": but this explicitly includes making derivative works, which I suspect aren't thus limited.
- Second, Academia agrees not to sell user content for a profit (but, again, derivatives)
I'm unconvinced that these limiters protect against AI-churning content at all.
@JubalBarca Not for Profit doesn't mean they can't pay their CEO 1billion so they never make a profit. It's a semantics game
PSA 3a: Other notes
- As noted earlier, it's possible that a bunch of this stuff is unenforceable in some jurisdictions. I don't advise testing this, lawyers are expensive.
- For comparison, the hcommons terms could do better on delimiters: they could set out more limits on content reuse. One advantage the hcommons ToS has though is that their license to use content stops if you remove the content: conversely the Academia licenses are irrevocable.
(Nb: am not a lawyer, so take my notes w/salt)
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