Eventually you can have a google scholar account with non institutionnal email, but once google will detect a double profile (in case you have also a second profile with institutionnal email) it will notify you to make only one of them public and you can save the second one (privately).
An online academy https://www.notifyacademy.sch.ng has been looking at similar problems, and how best to help solve them.
Notify Information Centre is a tier-1 Google Cloud partner focused on helping institutions, organizations, and small businesses increase communication and collaboration with Google Workspace for the regions - Southern Europe and Middle East Africa (SEEMEA).
Notify Academy is the prototype project with the objective of solving similar problems, helping students, academic scholars, entrepreneurs, SMB owners’ e.t.c who are interested in learning how Google tools and technologies can help them transform their various works or business.
Here are the key points -
(a) Academic researchers should be able to keep their Scholar profiles active and verified anytime, even if they switch between institutions or organizations, or if they lose access to previous institutional email accounts.
(b) Some academic researchers are still not able to create Scholar profiles using their institutional email - this problem has nothing to do with the researchers or scholars, it is the university or institution's webmasters or system administrators that are responsible for this specific bug or gap, for those on Google for Education (take note).
They need to ACTIVATE or ENABLE Scholar profiles for EVERYONE, in the Google Admin Console before anyone can create a profile on Google Scholar.
The reason for this is simple, Scholar profiles are "Additional Services" on Google Workspace for Education.
These are the steps to be completed by the university or institution webmasters or system administrators on Google for Education:
Log in to the Google Admin Console via https://admin.google.com
Apps > Additional Google Services > Settings for Scholar Profiles
Scholar Profiles > Status - ON/OFF for Everyone [ Done! ]
(c) There are some other categories of academic researchers burdened with a similar message below:
- Sustain their verification status on Google Scholar.
- Keep their respective profiles active on relevant platforms, and;
- Most importantly, help them also maintain the integrity and reputation of their articles while publishing as an independent researcher, for proper citations and indexing e.t.c.
According to a study:
“When it comes to citations, articles with an institutional email address received more than double the number of citations, than those with a non-institutional email address.”
So, try it out? here is the registration link https://www.notifyic.com/register.php
And for academic researchers who wants their schools or institution to also run on Google for Education, kindly complete this form https://forms.gle/y8TV7G1DhmrwATFj6