Update 6 February 2023
In good news, as of late January, a workaround has been enabled and successfully tested.
Changing your profile visibility
While most Google Scholar profiles have now been reset back to public, we recommend you check the settings for your profile by accessing your Google Scholar account settings. If your Google Scholar profile had previously been automatically set to ‘private’ you should now be able to make your profile ‘public’ again. If your profile is still on private, then please follow these steps:
You can do this via your Google Scholar account settings and following these steps:
- Log in to your Google Scholar profile page
- Click the ‘edit’ button next to your name
- Check the ‘Make my profile public’ box
- Click ‘save’.
If the "Edit" button doesn't appear, you will need to sign into the Google account that you used to create your profile to enable it.
While the workaround appears to have re-enabled the ability to change profile visibility, if you continue to experience this specific issue, the only remaining option is for you to set up a new Google Scholar profile using your personal email address.
Use your private email address
Our investigation led us to believe that only staff who used their RMIT email address as the primary means of registration for Google Scholar experienced this issue. The University and Google recommend that to make best use of your Google Scholar profile you should register using your private email account. Google Scholar is a free consumer service, as such Google are only willing to provide extremely limited technical support for any issues that may arise.
Decommissioning RMIT’s Google ecosystem
As part of RMIT’s ongoing decommissioning of our previous Google ecosystem, which has since been replaced by Microsoft Office 365, users will not have access to Scholar accounts created with RMIT email addresses beyond end of Q1 2024.
As mentioned, if you have previously used your RMIT email address as the primary registration method for Google Scholar you are strongly encouraged to change over to using a private email address (e.g. abc@gmail.com) to set up and manage your Google Scholar profile prior to the aforementioned date. You will also need to affiliate your new profile with RMIT. To do this, enter your RMIT email in the verify field when you create your new scholar account attached to your private email.
For further information on this process, please refer to the relevant Library Guide.
Updated 9 December 2022.
The Google Scholar platform is a free service provided by Google, which is used by many RMIT staff.
While the platform is not formally managed or supported by the University, we have been made aware of an issue with some RMIT staff Google Scholar profiles.
A number of staff with previously ‘public’ Google Scholar profiles have had their profiles automatically set to ‘private’ and are unable to revert this change.
While this issue may not affect all Google Scholar profiles, this issue appears to have occurred as an inadvertent consequence of other changes being made by Google to the Scholar platform.
Given the significant impact to our staff and the University by this issue, the ITS, Library and Research and Innovation teams have been working together with Google to resolve the issue as a matter of high priority. We are in the process of exploring and testing several potential technical solutions.
What does this mean for me?
If you have a Google Scholar profile that has been affected by this issue, there is no personal action you can take to revert your Google Scholar profile setting back to public.
At this stage we recommend not creating a second profile on Google Scholar as there may be potential issues with duplicate profiles.
We will continue to work on solutions and provide an update as soon as there is new information to share.
