Our mission is to accelerate the world’s research

179,000,000+

registered users

29,000,000+

uploaded papers

314,000,000+

visitors per month

About Academia

Academia is a platform for sharing academic research. Academics have uploaded 28 million papers, and 314 million academics, professionals, and students read papers on Academia every month.

Our Story

Founder and CEO, Academia.edu

Richard Price

Idea

Richard Price, the founder of Academia.edu, had the idea for the company when finishing his PhD at Oxford in philosophy.

As Richard was finishing his PhD, he decided he wanted to have a homepage where he could say “this is who I am; this is what I have been working on; here are my papers.” At the time, Oxford offered a few megabytes of space for personal websites, and you had to write your own HTML, and FTP files to the server yourself. Richard thought “there should be a one-click way of creating a homepage, and uploading papers. Having a homepage shouldn’t require technical ability.” Richard asked a few of his fellow graduate students, and they felt the same way.

Growth

In the early days, what mattered most of all was growth: growth in users and papers uploaded. In the first few months, we were growing at a linear rate. Some days 37 users would join, the next day 42, the next day 38. We made it to 50,000 users a year later, and someone posted on Facebook “Congratulations; here’s to 500,000 users.” Richard remembers thinking “wow, that is a lot. At a linear rate, that is going to take 10x the amount of time it has taken so far.”

We started to figure out exponential growth, and we got to 500,000 users, and then quickly to 1 million users. Today 179 million users have joined Academia.edu, and around 140,000 people join Academia.edu each day.

Read the full Academia.edu Story

Monthly signups to Academia.edu over time

Open Access

Academia’s goal is to ensure that every paper, ever written, is on the internet, available for free. 28 million papers have been uploaded to Academia.edu. We think there are ~100 million papers ever written, so we are ~28% of the way there.

Distribution

Academia’s goal is to build the fastest and most relevant paper distribution system in the world. Today Academia.edu’s algorithms make about 20 million paper recommendations a day.

Peer Review

Academia’s goal is to provide signals regarding the trustworthiness of papers, and the trustworthiness of individual claims within papers, on Academia.edu.

Formats

Academia’s goal is to enable the sharing of knowledge in novel and effective formats - video, short-form content, data-sets, code.

Mission

The mission of Academia.edu is to accelerate the world’s research. Our goal is to speed up research in every domain - finding a solution to climate change; finding cures for diseases; evolving artificial intelligence.
We want to accelerate research in all these fields, and others too.

Our guiding philosophy is that people want:

Research to be free

Research that is relevant to be recommended to them

Signals that help them evaluate the truth/falsity of what they are reading

Research to be presented in the right format, for easy comprehension

The end result is:

Research is accelerated: research towards solving the world’s problems is accelerated.

Research is democratized: everyone has access to it.

Business Model

Academia has a "Freemium" business model, providing free access to research for everyone and paid premium capabilities to subscribers. Subscribing to Academia Premium gives researchers access to advanced research discovery tools and gives authors enhanced analytics and impact tracking tools. Our 260,000+ premium subscribers cover the cost of hosting free research and pursuing our mission.

Mentions

Get notified when you’re cited, mentioned, referenced, thanked, or acknowledged by an author.

Advanced Search

Search the full text and citations of our millions of papers.

Bulk download

Download whole groups of related papers to jumpstart your research.

Summaries

Get summaries of papers & save time on research.

Grants

Find new fellowships and grants in your field.

Search alerts

Stay updated on your research with automatic reports of saved search queries.

Profile Visitors

See the university, title, and location of the people viewing your profile.

Personal website

Get a beautiful personal website powered by your Academia profile.

Readers

See who’s read your papers, learn about their research interests, and get in touch.

The Reach of Academia.edu

We have over 314 million visitors each month. People using Academia.edu include academics, professionals, and students.

The pen is mightier than the key-board. The kids I teach are in a K-8 school. The school says pencils will be banned next year. I am looking for research to change that decision.”

Teacher in the United States

The First Chapter

We have begun the project of making research open; distributed; verified; and available in new formats. We are proud of what Academia.edu has achieved so far. Most of the work lies in the future, and we find that inspiring.

Meet the Team

Leadership

Richard Price

Founder & CEO

Nate Sullivan

CTO

Yuri Niyazov

VP of Engineering

Paul Gu

VP of Finance

Jason Kellerman

Chief Product and Growth Officer

Hear from Academia.edu team members

Academia attracts kind, thoughtful people, it has an amazing mission, and it has a rapidly growing business. These things make Academia an amazing place to work at!