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Academia.edu

In this video, Dr Lee Fallin introduces Academia.edu as a scholarly communication tool.
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Academia.edu is a professional network focused to an academic audience. The main focus, however is on   uploading full texts of your research. You’ve  got to be careful to ensure that anything you   upload here you are licensed to do so. You’ll  see I’ve been able to share some of the journal   articles that are published open source so  any other researchers can click on these   and read them within the academia.edu  platform. This places academia.edu   as a really valuable way for you to be able to  build an academic audience for your work. You can   also use academia.edu to search for journal  articles.
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This isn’t as robust as a database   search but I may be able to find alternative  sources beyond the collection of my university.  
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academia.edu is also experimenting  with Letters, a new open access journal.

What is Academia.edu?

Academia.edu is an American for-profit social networking website for academics, focused on searching for research. Academia aims to be a disruptive influence on the sector, pushing open access and developing alternative routes to publication. It recently launched academia letters as a ‘lightning-fast’ peer-reviewed publication route; designed to share brief reports, orphaned findings and ideas. It is rumoured to be launching open access journals soon.

Key stats

According to Academia.edu, there are 178 million registered users and over 28 million uploaded papers.

How can it be used for scholarly communication?

As this website is focused on scientific and scholarly networking, it is a great place to share your research with a professional audience. While this network is not suitable for public communication, it is a great way to increase scholarly engagement with your work. As Academia.edu facilitates communication between researchers, it is a great place to make initial contact with others – or to be contacted. If you have peer-reviewed scholarly articles you will find this is an excellent space to share your work.

Getting started

You can create an Academia.edu account for free and then take a look at how to use academia.edu.

There are a number of related links beneath this article under the see also heading.

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