I just read an interesting blog post about Academia.edu by Gary Hall: http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2015/10/18/does-academiaedu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant.html
Academia.edu (and ResearchGate) come up quite frequently when I talk with faculty, postdocs, and grad students. I’ve always advised that it may be a good tool to use if you are trying to network with your colleagues, but that it isn’t necessarily the best choice if your goal is long-term access to your content. After all, Academia.edu makes no promises about the long-term preservation of works deposited – in fact they explicitly state that they reserve the right to terminate the site at any time without prior notice.
Gary’s article gets into the data mining aspect of sites like Academia.edu, where the product isn’t really the site, but the usage data generated on the site.
As with so many things, there are pros and cons to using sites like Academia.edu and ResearchGate. It’s important for us to talk with faculty about what those pros and cons are.
