Stuvia distinguishes itself from her competitors by having its core built around an open platform. What that means is that students will never lose ownership of their documents, and they can opt to either share freely or against a self determined amount of money. It's truly a platform where Stuvia mediates between students. Sellers manage their own 'knowledge store'. Usually, all your study material goes straight into the bin or a dusty (digital) cabinet. Now, we offer the opportunity to share that knowledge and by doing so, simply make some money out of it and help out other people. Stuvia does not believe in a utopia where all students study together, share their information for free or make any kind of effort for each other that is not directly rewarded. However, Stuvia does offer such a reward and creates an online platform were students and sellers, besides making money, are able to gain knowledge which was never available in the past. You can sell your documents on a national scale, but also regionally, within your school or even within courses. It all depends on how interesting and/or in demand your document is. For example, when you manage to concisely summarize a scientific paper by 'Porter' (a recurring popular and widely studied economics-related paper in various studies), you hugely increase the odds of students downloading your summary. On the other hand, we do not wish to discourage you from writing an in-depth analysis about a very obscure corner of science, or a short biography of a poet almost lost to history. Rather, we encourage it! The most often downloaded documents on Stuvia are the ones which summarize specific courses. If not merely the prescribed course book is summarized, but also the sheets, lecture notes and mandatory papers are taken into account, the document becomes highly valuable. Hundreds of downloads for these type of documents are not hard to accomplish. In fact, it's done several times by a various former students.