Short answers, pulled from the story.
Richard Price launched Academia.edu in 2008 as a commercial platform for sharing academic research. The site registered its domain name in 1999 when the .edu top-level domain was not limited to educational institutions.
In 2024, the company reported over 270 million registered users and more than 55 million papers available on the platform. By early 2022, the number of users had grown rapidly to about 10 million daily visits.
In 2013, Elsevier sent thousands of takedown notices to Academia.edu claiming copyright infringement targeting Elsevier-published content that researchers had posted on the platform. Following widespread complaints from academics, Elsevier retracted their request allowing academics to continue posting their publications without legal interference.
Recent launches include Academia Biology in March 2023 and Academia Engineering in June 2023. Additional titles like Academia Quantum appeared in May 2024 while others remain pending through late 2025.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick director of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association called this use extremely problematic arguing it might mislead users into thinking the site is part of an accredited educational institution rather than a for-profit company. The University of Oklahoma libraries warned that users are not customers but products these services seek to monetize.