Academia Inc. (better known as Academic.edu) reached out to have me download an article from the flaky American Journal of Engineering (AJER). Other than the publisher's name, Academia provided no information whatever about the article -- no title, no date, no author's name, no abstract -- nada. The email claimed to reflect my "reading history" on Academia -- which is virtually non-existent.
But there were two links, one to download the pdf of the unidentified article and another to view it. The view link was nothing more than a device to get me to buy a summary of the article on whatever it is. Evidently, the only way to find out what matched my alleged reading history was to download the pdf.
So I did. The title of the 2013 article is "The Use of Alternate Ligno-cellulosic Raw Materials Banana (Musa sapientum) Ankara(Calotropis procera ) [sic] and Pineapple (Ananas comosus ) [sic] in Handmade Paper & their Blending with Waste Paper." Now, I read a lot of things -- but not on the Academia site, and I can't imagine how this one is related to my work (or leisure).
Time to unsubscribe to Academia. Well, that's not so easy. Navigating there told me that "Your email address ... is currently opted-out of all Academia.edu email, because of your action or because emails we tried to send received an error code."
Academia.edu has been criticized for its misleading domain name and its efforts to collect fees from authors to promote their research. Pitchbook describes it as a for-profit company of 19 investors last receiving 19 million dollars in late-stage venture capital. The University of Oklahoma library explains the "disadvantages and downsides" for faculty considering uploading their work to Academia and its competitor, ResearchGate.
UPDATE 1/17/21: In reply to a request for help, Academia's support staff reported that they manually removed my account there.
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