# Academia

> Academia (Academia.edu, Academia Inc.) is a San Francisco based platform for sharing and discovering
> academic research, founded in 2008 by Richard Price. Researchers upload papers, build public profiles,
> follow research interests and track readership analytics; the company also runs the Academia journals
> program and sells Academia Premium subscriptions. Academia publishes no public developer program, API
> reference or machine-readable API specification.

## Status of the API surface

- Academia.edu has **no public API**, no developer portal and no published OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, GraphQL SDL
  or MCP server as of 2026-08-06.
- The `/v0/*` JSON endpoints referenced in `robots.txt` are the internal surface of Academia's own web
  client. They are `Disallow`ed to every crawler except three read-only paths
  (`/v0/users/*/following`, `/v0/users/*/coauthors`, `/v0/google_drive/notify_change`) and carry no
  published contract.
- The HTML site is served behind a Cloudflare managed challenge (`cf-mitigated: challenge`), so
  automated clients receive a 403 interstitial for `text/html` paths. `/robots.txt` and `/.well-known/*`
  are exempt.

## Site

- [Academia.edu](https://www.academia.edu/): main platform.
- [Academia Support](https://support.academia.edu/hc/en-us): help center covering accounts, uploads,
  analytics and Academia Premium.
- [Terms](https://www.academia.edu/terms)
- [Privacy](https://www.academia.edu/privacy)
- [GitHub organization](https://github.com/academia-edu): 81 public repositories, all internal Rails /
  infrastructure tooling and forks (`dejunk`, `cached_counts`, `linting-config`, `human-name-rb`,
  `redis_locks`). No client SDK and no specification for an Academia API.

## Machine-readable documents Academia does publish

- [security.txt](https://www.academia.edu/.well-known/security.txt): RFC 9116, contact
  `security@academia.edu`, full disclosure policy inline as comments, expires 2026-09-05.
- [robots.txt](https://www.academia.edu/robots.txt): 2,624 lines, a separate block for each of 59 named
  crawlers including the AI/agent user-agents GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot,
  Claude-User, Google-Extended, Gemini-Deep-Research, Applebot-Extended, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User,
  DuckAssistBot, MistralAI-User, TavilyBot, YouBot and Kagibot.

## API Evangelist profile artifacts

- [apis.yml](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/academia/refs/heads/main/apis.yml)
- [well-known/academia-well-known.yml](well-known/academia-well-known.yml): probe index with statuses.
- [well-known/academia-security.txt](well-known/academia-security.txt): verbatim copy.
- [well-known/academia-robots.txt](well-known/academia-robots.txt): verbatim copy.
- [security/academia-vulnerability-disclosure.yml](security/academia-vulnerability-disclosure.yml)
- [security/academia-domain-security.yml](security/academia-domain-security.yml)

---
generated: '2026-08-06'
method: generated
source: apis.yml + repo artifacts (no provider-published /llms.txt; https://www.academia.edu/llms.txt returned 404)