What Will Academia.edu Do with Its New Rights to Your Name, Likeness, and Voice? (updated)
Users of the Academia.edu service are cancelling their subscriptions in response to perceived overreach by the firm in its recent update to its terms of service.
A part of Academia.edu’s new user agreement.
Catching users’ attention was a new passage in the “License granted by Member” section of the terms, which says:
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.
The terms also continue to give Academia.edu broad leeway when it comes to making use of any writing you upload to it:
By making any Member Content available through the Site or Services, 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, in connection with operating and providing the Services and Content to you and to other Members, 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… You agree that Academia.edu may analyze, transform, and create derivative works from Member Content in connection with providing and improving its Services.
Many academics list their Academia.edu page as their personal websites. If you work in philosophy, and haven’t done so already, you may wish to consider creating a page at PhilPeople (its terms of use are here).
(Thanks to several readers for bringing this to my attention.)
UPDATE: In a comment below, Academia.edu’s owner, Richard Price, makes an announcement about the changes to its terms of service:
Today we removed reference to voice, likeness etc, and refined that paragraph to the following:
“By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, revocable, non-exclusive transferable license to display your profile information (e.g., your name, city, institutional affiliations, and areas of interest) to other Academia.edu accountholders, including in connection with promoting Academia.edu’s services and features. It does not give Academia.edu any ownership rights in your profile information, which remains yours.”
Read the rest of the update here.
This is really outrageous. The site at one point was pretty useful (back in 2010 or so), but it increasingly just leveled up the amount of spamming to get people to join the premium tier, so that you could barely navigate the free tier anymore without being bombarded with screens telling you about the premium tier (and what you’re missing out on, how you can find out the locations of people who have been clicking on your papers, etc). That was just very very annoying and made the site very irritating; but these new terms of service are absolutely completely a red line. Not only have i deleted my account, but it looks like philosophers are deleting their accounts en masse, much like many philosophers did an en masse shift away from twitter to BlueSky after Musk.
While I am still on academia, I only post the first page of my published research with the link to where it is published, no longer keep any drafts there, and have links to my other sites. That way folks can still find me and my work, but academia becomes more of a redirecting platform. Its not a perfect solution, but it is one way to minimize the degree to which they can feed off of my work and my person.
PhilPapers can make your work just as accessible (indeed more accessible given academia.edu’s various paywall-like features). There’s really no good reason to not use PhilPapers instead.
They are doing this because of AI. All of my pieces now have a five-minute podcast introducing them: https://kwantlen.academia.edu/MarcChampagne
I’m sorry, I don’t understand the podcast thing’s connection to Academia’s overreach here.
EDIT: sorry, I see what you mean now. A comment down below helped!
I closed my account a month ago – the greed of Academia.edu was getting too much, especially since it is being run by a philosopher. All you need is https://philpapers.org/ and https://www.researchgate.net/
I use Philpapers and Researchgate and academia.edu. They are all different, apart from in trivial ways and the way flagged by this blog post (which is useful for me). Regarding academia.edu, I can create new sections and label them, such as a section for papers of mine imitating Helen Beebee (or failing to!). But sometimes I worry that I shall have to create another database despite these three and more.
Thank you. Account deleted.
Here’s how to opt out from AI-generated stuff.
1) sign in to academia.edu
2) go to your profile and click account setting (up right under your photo)
3) choose AI settings on the left
4) change enabled to disabled
5) done. AI-produced material is disabled from your profile
Btw. I usually just link my stuff to Academia.edu rather than upload them.
This hides the AI-produced stuff, but it doesn’t get around the terms of service that say they can produce derivatives of your work, for example to promote their Academia Letters quasi-journal
If you don’t want to go as far as deleting your account, you can opt out of AI-generated content in your profile: https://support.academia.edu/hc/en-us/articles/33051579972503-How-do-I-opt-out-of-AI
We updated terms on Academia.edu last week, and there were a number of questions online in relation to that paragraph about voice, likeness etc.
Today we removed reference to voice, likeness etc, and refined that paragraph to the following:
“By creating an Account with Academia.edu, you grant us a worldwide, revocable, non-exclusive transferable license to display your profile information (e.g., your name, city, institutional affiliations, and areas of interest) to other Academia.edu accountholders, including in connection with promoting Academia.edu’s services and features. It does not give Academia.edu any ownership rights in your profile information, which remains yours.”
What we clarified:
What hasn’t changed:
The updated terms are at https://www.academia.edu/terms
Richard Price,
Founder, Academia.edu
It’s good that you reversed or modified your policy, but it sounds like this latest controversy was just the tipping point that’s triggering an exodus. This is on top of spam, utility, and other complaints lodged against Academia.edu.
Once you lose trust, it’s very hard to regain it. Maybe you’ll want to create a Trust & Ethics Team to work on that, if you think your for-profit service is still viable in today’s information environment (which is very different than in 2008 when you launched). Good luck.
Agreed.The good thing about Academia.edu is it allowed me to interact with work from a wide range of disciplines. But that they tried this at all says a lot.
Sorry, I don’t accept re-dos.
The terms that you linked still have the original wording. The time stamp shows they were last updated on September 22. When do you plan to change them to the new wording you’ve described?
Ouch, good catch!
Richard, I wasn’t able to remove a co-author (who wanted their name to be removed from an article) or even delete that particular article, so I just deleted the whole thing, in part because I didn’t think I was getting any benefit from it anymore either.
Thank you for posting, but I just looked at the Terms of Use and the paragraph about using my content “in any manner” including voice and likeness, is still there under License Granted by Member: “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.”
Has the updated text quoted above not yet been published? I only looked at the Terms of Use for the first time a few hours ago, so I don’t think this is a cache issue. Thank you.
How do I turn off AI from manipulating my materials on academia.edu?
Why can’t I access my own account and pages, which I have had for many years, without consenting to the new terms? That is not consent, but coercion. It is enough to make me terminate my account, if I can discover a way to do that.
Since no one is bringing this up, gotta add that the 5 minute podcasts are excruciatingly awful. It’s an AI voice (modeled after some guy who names himself as the host) and the summary is without any substance, full of fluff phrases praising your paper, intended to make it hip and cool (it’s not). Also: papers already have summaries (it’s called an ABSTRACT). If the podcast is better at summarizing your work than you, maybe consider taking an academic writing course…
This reminds me of Russia’s recent incursion into NATO airspace (Poland, Estonia). Putin wanted to see how far he can go – and Academia.edu might have tried the same strategy?
It could also simply be FOMO (fear of missing out)—which is also driving many companies to prematurely jump on the AI bandwagon—along with an inability to read the room.
The policy in question looks like a terrible miscalculation about how academics would receive it, who largely seem skeptical of AI and are concerned about privacy. No nefarious intent needed.
True!
Basic situation worldwide now:
I’m glad that Academia.edu is getting some heat. A few months ago I realized that they auto-renewed my membership when I had explicitly told them not to, and had actually done this over the last few years as well. They were very reluctant to give me a refund, which is now a whopping $300 a year membership for the premium service. I wasn’t able to get everything back, but I will NEVER use their services again. Word to the wise: make sure they don’t have credit card information on file!
I’m quite happy about deleting my account after 13 years on there. At one point I was a very active user, and I even participated in a live-on-Zoom R&D interview with them about what services would be appealing to scholars like me. Of course, they decided to go in a totally different, scammy direction after that. It seems to me it was always a project whose profit goals outstripped its business model
Do we know if there has been / will be an uptick in users of PhilPeople, HCommons, etc.? The nice thing about Academia had once been that it was so common.