Help › Accounts and .edu verification

Accounts and .edu verification

Why .edu?

Requiring a university address keeps the community to people with a real academic affiliation, and makes the one-paper-per-year rule meaningful. Your domain is shown next to your name on comments (for example stanford.edu). Your actual email address is never shown.

How registration works

1. Enter your name and an address ending in .edu.
2. We email you a link. No account exists yet.
3. Open the link, which proves the mailbox is yours, and choose a password. Your account is created and you are signed in.

The link is valid for 72 hours. If it expires, simply register again.

Addresses that are treated as the same

Capitalisation and “plus” tags are ignored, so jane+news@uni.edu and Jane@uni.edu are the same account as jane@uni.edu.

I don't have a .edu address

We currently accept only addresses ending in .edu. If your institution uses a different domain, contact the administrators.

Forgotten password

Use Forgot your password? on the login page. Reset links work once and expire after 60 minutes. Changing or resetting your password signs out your other devices.