Academia Announces $23.5 Million in New Funding Led by China’s Tencent, Plans to Expand Into Open Access Journal Publishing and Hosting

From Academia.edu:

Academia.edu has grown to 175 million users and is nearing half of the world’s academic research content. With around 100 million papers written since the 1600s, Academia aims to make every research paper ever written freely available on the internet. This growth has attracted $23 million in Series D funding led by Tencent, bringing the total investment raised to $63 million. True Ventures and Greyrock Investments also participated in the funding round. With this new funding, the company aims to expand into allowing academics to be peer-reviewed and published in journals hosted on the Academia platform.

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More From the Financial Times

“We want to build the world’s fastest academic peer reviewed open access publishing,” [Richard] Price, [Founder and CEO] said. “The whole process takes 10 days rather than traditionally 12 months.” The move follows the company’s launch of an experimental journal called Academia Letters last year, which has so far published 5,000 short peer reviewed articles.

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