Stuvia

Stuvia Review:

Stuvia is an international marketplace where students can go to upload and sell their class notes. The site allows sellers to set their own rates, but imposes a minimum rate of $2.50 (unless you’re giving the notes away for free). There’s no cost to register and upload notes for sale. However, the site will take a 30% commission on any money you make.

You retain rights

By and large, the student/seller maintains the rights to their notes and can list them for sale on other sites, as well. However, if you create a set of flashcards as part of your study guide, Stuvia grabs “royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual” rights to that particular intellectual property.

The site is so covetous of your flashcards, in fact, that it demands in the site’s terms that if you agree to “perform any legal act necessary” to transfer your intellectual property rights to those flashcards to the site.

Outside of that weirdness, the site’s terms are pretty reasonable. You get paid once a week through Stripe when your account has more than $10 accumulated in it.

Recommendations

Don’t create or sell flashcards on Stuvia.

If you sell notes here, you may also want to also sell them elsewhere. (You created them. You have the right to sell the where ever you wish, unless a site’s terms requires exclusivity.)

However, make sure you are never plagiarizing your professor’s work. His or her study guides, power-point slides and notes belong to him/her. Your notes on that material belong to you (as long they’re original). Anything you’ve quoted from your professor’s notes should be attributed.

Also be sure to check your school’s policy on selling class notes before you upload. Some schools prohibit selling your own class notes and can kick you out of class if you violate the ban. Other schools will hire you directly through the school’s disability services department to take notes for students who can’t take notes themselves. In some cases, those deals can be more lucrative than selling notes through Stuvia or other websites.

Other sites where you can sell your notes, include Study Soup and Nexus Notes. However, be aware that while Study Soup pays more per upload, it also claims the notes for its own.