Last week’s close attention to open access, its development, its present state, and its potential futures, surfaced not only the importance for both the individual scholar and the field at large of sharing work as openly as possible, with a range of broadly conceived publics, but also some continuing questions about the best means of accomplishing that sharing. As I mentioned last week, providing opportunities for work to be opened at the point of publication itself is one important model, but a model that may well have occluded our vision of other potential forms: the ease of using article-processing charges to offset any decline in subscription revenue possible as previously paywalled content becomes openly available is so apparent as to have become rapidly naturalized, allowing us to wave off the need for experimentation with less obvious — and less remunerative — models.
Among alternative models, as I noted, is author-originated sharing of work, often in pre-print forms, via the open web. Many authors already share work in this way, whether posting drafts on their blogs for comment or depositing manuscripts in their institutional repositories. And recently, many scholars have also taken to sharing their work via Academia.edu, a social network that allows scholars to build connections, get their work into circulation, and discover the work of others. I’m glad to see the interest among scholars in that kind of socially-oriented dissemination and sharing, but I’m very concerned about this particular point of distribution and what it might mean for the future of the work involved.
Here’s the crux of the matter:
When scholars use academia dot edu are they aware that they are providing their data to a for-profit venture capital backed company?
— Seth Denbo (@seth_denbo) October 19, 2015
The first thing to note is that, despite its misleading top level domain (which was registered by a subsidiary prior to the 2001 restrictions), Academia.edu is not an educationally-affiliated organization, but a dot-com, which has raised millions in multiple rounds of venture capital funding. This does not imply anything necessarily negative about the network’s model or intent, but it does make clear that there are a limited number of options for the network’s future: at some point, it will be required to turn a profit, or it will be sold for parts, or it will shut down.
And if the network is to turn a profit, that profit has a limited number of means through which it can be generated: either academics who are currently contributing their work to this space will have to pay to continue to access it, or the work that they have contributed will somehow be mined for sale, whether to advertisers or other interested parties. In fact, Academia.edu’s CEO has said that “the goal is to provide trending research data to R&D institutions that can improve the quality of their decisions by 10-20%.” Statements like this underwrite Gary Hall’s assessment of the damage that the network can do to genuine open access: “Academia.edu has a parasitical relationship to the public education system, in that these academics are labouring for it for free to help build its privately-owned for-profit platform by providing the aggregated input, data and attention value.” The network, in other words, does not have as its primary goal helping academics communicate with one another, but is rather working to monetize that communication. All of which is to say: everything that’s wrong with Facebook is wrong with Academia.edu, at least just up under the surface, and so perhaps we should think twice before commiting our professional lives to it.
The problem, of course, is that many of us face the same dilemma in our engagement with Academia.edu that we experience with Facebook. Just about everyone hates Facebook on some level: we hate its intrusiveness, the ways it tracks and mines and manipulates us, the degree to which it feels mandatory. But that mandatoriness works: those of us who hate Facebook and use it anyway do so because everyone we’re trying to connect with is there. And as we’ve seen with the range of alternatives to Facebook and Twitter that have launched and quickly faded, it’s hard to compete with that. So with Academia.edu: I’ve heard many careful, thoughtful academics note that they’re sharing their work there because that’s where everybody is.
And the “everybody” factor has been a key hindrance to the flourishing of other mechanisms for author-side sharing of work such as institutional repositories. Those repositories provide rigorously protected and preserved storage for digital objects, as well as high-quality metadata that can assist in the discovery of those objects, but the repositories have faced two key challenges: first, that they’ve been relatively siloed from one another, with each IR collecting and preserving its own material independently of all others, and second, that they’ve been (for the obvious reason) institutionally focused. The result of the former is that there hasn’t been any collective sense of what material is available where (though the ARL/AAU/APLU-founded project SHARE is working to solve that problem). The result of the latter is that a relatively small amount of such material has been made available, as researchers by and large tend to want to communicate with the other members of their fields, wherever they may be, rather than feeling the primary identification with their institutions that broad IR participation would seem to require. So why, many cannot help but feel, would I share my work in a place where it will be found by few of the people I hope will read it?
The disciplinary repository may provide a viable alternative — see, for instance, the long-standing success of arXiv.org — but the fact that such repositories collect material produced in disciplines rather than institutions is only one of the features key to their success, and to their successful support of the goals of open access. Other crucial features include the not-for-profit standing of those repositories, which can require thoughtful fundraising but keeps the network focused on the researchers it comprises, and those repositories’ social orientation, facilitating communication and interconnection among those researchers. That social orientation is where Academia.edu has excelled; early in its lifespan, before it developed paper-sharing capabilities, the site mapped relationships among scholars, both within and across institutions, and has built heavily upon the interconnections that it traced — but it has not primarily done so for the benefit of those scholars or their relationships.
Scholarly societies have the potential to inhabit the ideal point of overlap between a primary orientation toward serving the needs of members and a primary focus on facilitating communication amongst those members. This is in large part why we established MLA Commons, to build a not-for-profit social network governed and developed by its members with their goals in mind. And in working toward the larger goals of open access, we’ve connected this social network with CORE, a repository through which members can not only deposit and preserve their work, but also share it directly with the other members of the network. We’re also building mechanisms through which CORE can communicate with institutional repositories so that the entire higher-education-based research network can benefit.
Like all such networks, however, the Commons will take time to grow, so we can’t solve the “everybody” problem right away. But we’re working toward it, through our Mellon-supported Humanities Commons initiative, which seeks to bring other scholarly societies into the collective. The interconnections among the scholarly society-managed Commonses we envision will not only help facilitate collaboration across disciplinary lines but also allow members with overlapping affiliations to have single sign-on access to the multiple groups of scholars with whom they work. We are working toward a federated network in which a scholar can maintain and share their work from one profile, on a scholar-governed network, whose direction and purpose serve their own.
So, finally, a call to MLA members: when you develop your member profile and share your work via the Commons, you not only get your work into circulation within your community of practice, and not only raise the profile of your work within that community, but you also help support us as we work to solve the “everybody” problem of the dot-com that threatens to erode the possibilities for genuine open access.
Academia, Not Edu – Planned Obsolescence https://t.co/rl8vmTADtw
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/TOcVu7JVhW
I have an honest question, actually a couple. First, what happens to the materials when my membership lapses? Personally, I’m shifting careers and thus scholarship and professional affiliation. My work in MLA-type research is still relevant but my MLA membership, not as much. Do I need to keep the membership to keep my research available? Which brings up the question of membership at all. Freemium sites lik Academia.edu are attractive to many scholars because they are free now. And by scholars, I mean adjuncts, graduate students, and other poorly compensated members of the academy. Free is perhaps where everyone is at because that’s what most people can afford. I know the cost is nominal as well as presented on a sliding scale, and I also know that providing these services aren’t free, but free now (not to mention SEO optimized) is not a minor selling point for the service academia.edu provides. I could also add that the transdisciplinary nature of academia.edu is a feature that represents an opportunity for scholars to brush up against other perspectives, almost the way wandering the stacks in the library once did (and for many of us admittedly still do). And finally, for many of us who have been doing research and writing and publishing “for free” as adjuncts and contingent faculty while institutions profits in terms of prestige, at least academia.edu is honest in its capitalist goals.
I say this not to tear down the project but because I would like it to succeed, but to succeed, it import to consider other reasons why academia.edu will continue to be a more attractive choice.
The materials remain available if your membership lapses! The only thing that would change is your ability to continue contributing to the conversations on the Commons. But honestly, given the work going on via Connected Academics and other such programs, I wouldn’t be too quick to assume that MLA membership won’t remain relevant in your new career. MLA members are in an increasingly wide range of professions, and the conversations across those professions remain crucial to them. Participating in those conversations, and shaping those programs, is an indispensable benefit of membership, one that I consider worth supporting. And honestly, “free” is never free. Caveat emptor, is all I’m saying.
Problemet med sosiale medier for forskere – Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/Xl1byebCkw
Love this, Kathleen. At the risk of self-promoting, I think my post from last week focuses on one of the challenges that can prevent scholars from sharing their work on CORE. We are going to have to work to get publishers to understand that there really isn’t a reason to differentiate between institutional and disciplinary repositories. If author agreements don’t give us the right to share our work in something like CORE, it doesn’t matter how good the model is.
Thanks, Brian — and you’re absolutely right about the obstacles that unaltered publisher agreements can present to developing disciplinary networks and repositories. I’ll hope that your post encourages more scholars to read those agreements carefully and to consider the ways that addenda like SPARC’s can support a more open, more flexible future for scholarly communication.
I share your concerns about academia.edu. As a private startup, it can only go rotten over time. I forsee three possible scenarios:
1) it goes bust. If they’re lucky, users will have some reasonable period in which to export their data in some hopefully not too disastrous format;
2) it is bought-out by a rival. This is the usual startup business plan. Cf. Mendeley buyout by Elsevier.
3) it becomes a hideous, gouging, privacy-busting behemoth from which no escape is possible.
These newcomers only succeed at challenging the existing infrastructure because they provide user-oriented reference management features that the existing library infrastructure is failing to provide.
Where is the universal public database of author/title/publication metadata to serve as a common component for any reference management tool? The amount of researcher time wasted on managing these personally and institution-wide must be colossal.
It can’t be such a huge amount of data: the whole of Medline is about 113GB; the whole of ArXiV fits on a 64GB thumbdrive; and so on, which implies the metadata of every scholarly publication ever would fit on a modern desktop machine.
Why does this not exist, and what are librarians doing about it?
I hadn’t realized the “size” of ArXiV. Is this because it keeps its contents in LaTeX and generates PDFs on the fly? I confess I don’t know much about its mechanics/infrastructure, but I am profoundly jealous that scientists/physicists have it. Why the humanities run so far behind in this, and seem to depend so heavily on proprietary solutions to everything from word processing (Word) to digital accessioning (Aca.edu) truly escapes me.
Have you used WorldCat at all? (worldcat.org) It’s a database of the catalogs of member libraries, which is most if not all in the US and a number internationally. Listings of books, articles, archival works, etc. work with ref mgmt tools, or at least with both Mendeley and Zotero, which I’ve used myself. Metadata may not be exactly correct for every citation style in every entry, but as I tell students, that’s true of every database/citation manager (unless you enter everything yourself, which as you note is time-consuming), so it’s always best to check everything over before you consider it complete.
So to your question, it does exist, and librarians have been adding to it for years.
I’ve always wondered what the deal with https://t.co/6E515IaTxV was. @kfitz explains: https://t.co/Ag82kZFHvH
Academia, Not Edu – @kfitz on the digital commons https://t.co/opqJuJ1XSU
I haven’t heard any talk about Academia.edu in years. Research Gate is the latest rage. Why is that and do you see any differences?
That’s interesting! I can’t tell where you are posting, of course, but I wonder if it’s a Europe/US difference, given that ResearchGate is based in Germany. That EU home points to another possibility, though: ResearchGate was not subject to the flood of Elsevier DMCA takedown notices that hit Academia.edu a while back due to differences in national laws. The other possibility is that it’s a field-based thing, but I’m not sure.
As to differences — honestly, I haven’t spent any time with ResearchGate, and I don’t know the sources of their funding, so I can’t say. I’d love to know your thoughts!
I was also going to mention to ResearchGate, which seems big here at Virginia Tech. Maybe more sciencey than academia.edu? Dunno.
RG is STEM-focused while Academia seems to attract more in the humanities. I’m in a STEM school and most people who’d have accounts with this sort of site have one on RG and post to it fairly regularly, while some may have accounts in Academia but most have done very little with it.
Oh and as to funding (just did a workshop on social networking for researchers so I’m more up on this topic than I might otherwise be), RG is like Academia in that both are funded by investors.
Isn’t that depressing!
I signed up to academia to get to an article I needed for my dissertation (in art history, film and the various preipherals) The signed up to RG fro another article which I didn’t get un fortunately, there still seems to be less that’s uploaded there.
Academia looks a lot more like a wall of articles and papers. Research looks more like facebook for geeks; it has a more higly developed Q&A line. And since I’m a gabby goat, I posted some answers to those questions and got swept into a rather fun debate.
It’s depressing to fing that RG is also a for profit enterprise, but the real problem is entirely that: how can researchers live from the work they do? But in media, I really can’t see a way around either the audience to advertisers paradygm or a pay to play paradygm.
All this of course wouldn’t matter if work were payed at the scholar’s workplace, and that from the graduate level at least. But that isn’t the case, so researchers are becoming more and more dependant on getting there stuff out there just to get noticed.
Finally, if these sites were up-front about their for profit status, it would be chilling, but it wouldn’t really be a problem – if all the work supplied by the researchers were also compensated.
All of this is a connondrum that I don’t see a practical solution to…
“everything that’s wrong with Facebook is wrong with https://t.co/9ZcpAdBbDV“: fascinating post by @kfitz. https://t.co/YS6x7ln1Nb
Voilà pourquoi je n’utilise pas ce Facebook pseudo-académique : “Academia, Not Edu”. https://t.co/5zvZsNxPwu via @kfitz
At some point, https://t.co/vC3JHSSJK6 will be required to turn a profit, sold for parts, or shut down — @kfitz
https://t.co/IysY0gpagq
Worth reading: this thoughtful piece about academia[dot]edu by @kfitz : https://t.co/PwNa3mDXc8
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/DOpciuiXOH
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/xbT7b1H8KE via @kfitz
Interesting: Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/RaHVLj0pjZ
“everything that’s wrong with Facebook is wrong with https://t.co/tr5AlSpH04” https://t.co/ZT6AvCITIw
@DrDonnaYates Apparently, you’re not alone: https://t.co/YM9fcdUGfa
Thanks for reposting of my tweet Kathleen, and for the clear explanation of everything that went unsaid in my 140 characters about why people should be aware of the commercial nature of academia.edu. I like the way you’ve pointed out that people find Facebook and its ilk useful for very legitimate reasons, and that the challenges of creating something that reproduce those reasons are significant. As users of the web, we all use commercial services all the time. What’s important is to do so in an informed way. Too often with services that are collecting our data, it’s not clear to many users what use the collector will make of it, and that’s where much of the problem lies.
Thank you for the tweet, Seth, which prompted me to get this thing that had been nagging at me for some time into circulation. I hope that our organizations can work together to build better not-for-profit alternatives to this particular service.
Academia, Not Edu! https://t.co/jX2JT1eWyW via @kfitz #openaccess
Je mets dans Academia des liens vers HAL-SHS. Et vous ? #OpenAccess | MT @kfitz: Academia, Not Edu. https://t.co/CgyR7BClo2
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/4wXYNMRcLP
.@kfitz on why Academia (dot ) edu is not the solution to #OA for academic research/scholarly publishing: https://t.co/VWRdrcCwQo
I would love to see @AARWeb do something like this for our field. https://t.co/jQq0LeJldX https://t.co/afpaoIcCmT
Academia, Not Edu: Planned Obsolescence https://t.co/XGQU1zCntt via kfitz
As usual, insightful words from Kathleen Fitzpatrick:
https://t.co/qgbkwrzu3d
This is why I don’t use https://t.co/rFiwhtybIO — and explains the recent uptick in use of MLA Commons https://t.co/WG5rhL6i4C
The Facebookification of academic discovery
https://t.co/8SpmUKE2Ln
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/E1Sa7dBbkX @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/Kak5UUC0de wages for facebook -> wages for https://t.co/UFLo2r4oEm?
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/7vTSS8caAl via @kfitz important to know!
“everything that’s wrong with Facebook is wrong with https://t.co/kM5yAdyEtp” https://t.co/zU2d98hM8h
Academia, Not Edu by @kfitz https://t.co/CyJ9IblAY3 HT @explorstyle
Haven’t decided what to do but this critique of https://t.co/M5OpruyPWj is pretty thought-provoking. https://t.co/RXdrVsZBmU #HigherEd
Great post on sharing (or not sharing) research & publications on https://t.co/qRkurD2uwk https://t.co/RT6pSZtyqi https://t.co/UfjJFeMXnw
Good reminder of https://t.co/J1Pf0ewstE's for-profit stakeholders and push for other possible open-access platforms https://t.co/8pGZE8bIcg
Academia dot edu seems to be making some money by advertising head-hunters. Most of these still are for IT and STEM related fields, but a few others pop up from time to time.
Academia dot edu also could make money licensing reader subscription access, i.e., to those who do not contribute anything peer-reviewed or already journal-published there.
Academia dot edu’s inter and intra-disciplinary nature is in fact one of its best features.
There is also another database system in Europe other than Research Gate, fyi ORCID. I have received requests for papers from RG users, but since an int’l journal owns the copyright to my paper, I have no standing to share it. On academia dot edu, users get the abstract and link to the journal, and not the paper itself. Which points to another benefit of academia dot edu, to find something useful to do with otherwise unpublished works. Hard to see academia dot edu monetizing those, however, since they have not been through peer review. In some ways, academia dot edu is a peer review vehicle, but all ad-hoc. To open an actual comments page on an uploaded item there is non-trivial and tedious!
Hope they build a customer base of academic hiring scouts!
Important from @kfitz : Academia, Not Edu – Planned Obsolescence https://t.co/EE2B5erUBA
The problem with arXiv.org is its disciplinary concentration. It is not open enough in this respect. So, a lot of disciplines are ipso facto left out.
“Academia, Not Edu” @kfitz on the importance of non profit area focused scholarly networks and repositories https://t.co/XhXpqjBeaO
Can’t help but see connexions between this (https://t.co/lv5mrUqCSz) and this (https://t.co/crwnxBHnPM) #ProQuestGate
Critical post on the ‘academic facebook’ where all scholars hang out: Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/K8kG6bAnPl via @kfitz and @ldegoei
Academia, Not Edu – Planned Obsolescence – interesting concerns about publishing on https://t.co/aTankz8vMz https://t.co/h5IE3uB2xW
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/1o7m7w1Mi2 via @kfitz
For those of you annoyed by #ProQuestGate, read @kfitz latest piece on Academia not Edu: https://t.co/v6w9CvbLUx
Good piece on the potential dangers of https://t.co/WZKb6jRlZo: https://t.co/PuyQ8jGwfx: Not Edu https://t.co/uFWp8bjcDK #openaccess
interesting post on #openaccess and academia dot edu https://t.co/ctU4SjqBmU
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/A2HQ75Twbz via @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/0cgUNUbJCz via @nuzzel https://t.co/wHt6E1SSs5
https://t.co/zPLMP2faOe #digitalscholar
Good critique of concerns with lending academic work to third party services. Academia, Not Edu. https://t.co/P624sFbwuO
@pelle_jons monetize that communication.”
https://t.co/XPBbwu9HG7
Questioning sustainability of proprietary platforms: Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/A93rUJaPo4 via @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/1r4TvLn3cc via @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu – Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Planned Obsolescence) https://t.co/MVpPT7LIWz via @kfitz #AcademiaEdu
“Academia, Not Edu.” https://t.co/jL9rMmscxD
“Academia, Not Edu”: thoughts on how we should share our publications on a scholar-governed network. https://t.co/hqbA5inJYa via @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/BYuZnsygPH por @kfitz #openaccess vía @audreywatters
@jofsharp @TreborS @mckenziewark @NSFreePress Not Lyterati nor https://t.co/GRKvlXbgSA https://t.co/F1RnP55efi maybe https://t.co/x2Bl5bZtsu
Author-originated sharing of work @kfitz https://t.co/sw6DRkJihj @Mittelalterblog @Archivalia_kg @Openreflections @ekansa @DataAtCU @libmark
Could never quite pin down why, since I’m pro-open access, social media etc & love metrics. This post helped tho. https://t.co/DoaqWuAsuP
@DrAnnieGray ..or try to monetise in future. This is worth a read https://t.co/DoaqWuAsuP
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/K82kFGXzLz via @kfitz “[it] is not an educationally-affiliated organization, but a dot-com”
Re: https://t.co/QrqClw5OuD & #ProQuestGate @SMCoulombeau @kimbraxton, you might be interested in this, by @kfitz https://t.co/5BxD4XdooQ
#openaccess #openwashing Academia, Not Edu – Planned Obsolescence https://t.co/Em5Yb70Wa6 HT @roughbounds
AcademiaDOTedu in der Kontroverse: https://t.co/hA4hWPPB0s
According to @kfitz: “we should think twice before committing our #professional lives to [#Academia (dot) #edu]” https://t.co/aO21gPeqIM
Is Open Access a door than can be co-opted, and then closed?: https://t.co/6MMQWaY2fE via @kfitz | @Loop_Network @brembs @BioMedCentral
A follow-up on my own questions on socially-oriented dissemination and sharing of papers: good post by @kfitz there: https://t.co/s64yIi1lYw
@GenreResearch @kfitz @MLACommons see https://t.co/pyvzbZ6Yyk, https://t.co/YmL5zBqSog, and https://t.co/w0Yf6ezEvC
@DA_Banks I found this to be a smart reflection: https://t.co/zU2d98hM8h
@timelfen @DA_Banks Lots of recent skepticism abt https://t.co/5NZE6Ksb18, though: https://t.co/fWRSJCUljB
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/yQpXqg1DBg via @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu by @kfitz https://t.co/pbERUHNS6p via @marindacos
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/BPJk6YuKyD via @kfitz #uccdh #openaccess
“Academia, Not Edu – Planned Obsolescence” https://t.co/VhXIRU0cWN
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/appSXCzhAa via @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/l0kM6L9nWX via @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/z9DyHK2rcE via @kfitz
Even if US centered, a must-read reflection on disciplinary #openaccess by @kfitz “Academia, Not Edu,” https://t.co/bYw5uekxYZ @academia
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/KOHqgfuiaF via @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu via @kfitz https://t.co/0MUH5TeVAP
A non-profit alternative for life scientists is lifescience.net.
@RemiMathis @ndelavergne une analyse intéressante https://t.co/k3i740vFr1
Late to this from @kfitz, “Academia, Not Edu” https://t.co/A2q9o5n2PF
https://t.co/BE728QoKm9 “at some point, it will be required to turn a profit, or it will be sold for parts, or it will shut down.”
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/tzgHpDNCMc via @kfitz
@edrabinski Here you go – https://t.co/la6FM8Svxc
@aasearle @cath_fletcher MLA Commons appears to be an alternative: https://t.co/tUoTosqcWV. What troubles me is copyright infringement.
.@dzorich projects like @MLACommons are great in that regard c.f. @kfitz https://t.co/XhXpqjBeaO see also Arxiv, RePEc & SSRN
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/bhiG9NlPNB via @kfitz
Okay, an opinion question.
30+ yrs ago, when I started academic research, the best way to discover publications was bibliographies. The biblios were sold to (generally) research libraries. It could take (well, it often took me) a week or two to comb all the biblios (as I worked at a nexus of technology and the humanities) Once I identified papers I /might/ need, I could then order them from the publisher of the bibliography or from the author or original publisher.
Putting aside the speed issues (admittedly artificial) how different is what was the norm then from the norm now? At some level, it seems that someone-not-me is making money from my work. And it was still possible to collect statistics and act upon them.
Academia, Not Edu: https://t.co/hab6JSvva0 via @kfitz
… because this https://t.co/DQ90Wc0IuI via @kfitz
Plus, @kfitz’s post on this, already tweeted https://t.co/DQ90Wc0IuI
I missed the part where this inititative, i.e. academia.edu is bad. So, yes, it’s done by a bunch of individuals, not an institution. It needs money in order provide excellent services that you don’t have to pay for. Mmmmhhh… . It’s certainly not pseudo-academic by virtue of the thousands of very real and quality academics/scholars/researchers that use it. There is nothing remotely comparable for getting and sharing articles. But yes, I don’t want to be naive, what are they actually doing with all that data? What is the real beef you have with them. It can’t be that it’s commercial, otherwise we should not buy books from commercial publishers anymore either… heck, we shouldn’t go to universities that take fees… . So, could you be clearer about the actually evil of academia.edu? Ah, and another thing I found positive: Even people not associated with institutions can and do publish. What alternative would these people have in terms of a serious platform? Lastly, if academia.edu were to shut down are commercialise in a more aggressive way, what problem is there with one’s work? Surely, we all have copies of what we upload.
Academia, Not Edu – Kathleen Fitzpatrick https://t.co/UD3mbG3yRJ
@babette_babich @UCLpress @DavidPriceUCL @ucylpay @donaldbarclay https://t.co/5mgXHyV5jn
@Dymaxion What Ted said. @kfitz has complete lowdown https://t.co/tsBN0cXTG7 Ask univ. librarians if institutional repository is an option.
MLA’s Kathleen Fitzpatrick on the problems with https://t.co/TEpY5Hv3c4: https://t.co/A1eK1lREmq
A useful article on gated academic communities: https://t.co/Yo6Uk6GQGQ Also worth a read: https://t.co/LeoJnKUtxS
@Protohedgehog i don’t disagree that the problem is larger. i do like kathleen fitzpatrick’s take on it: https://t.co/Q8Zho6tUQv
Challenges of trans-displinary, trans-intitutional, open access repositories —> Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/ufcn2Rg1wS #DeleteAcademiaEdu
“All of which is to say: everything that’s wrong with Facebook is wrong with Academia.edu,….” There is a root cause behind all these problems – money.
Yet, money is false, because money is not an object of nature. Only objects of nature and their characteristics, which we call as the laws of nature are true. Everything else is false. Thus we have two things which are false, real numbers and money, which is also a real number. You cannot create something true using something false, like money.
Since money is false, it cannot be necessary to run an economy. That is, we can run the same economy that we have now, in the exact same way without any kind of money, and yet give full democracy, and any lifestyle anybody wants. The problems in all areas, like academia, education, poverty, unemployment, wars are all created for money and by money. Note also that since money is false, it must be free and abundant at its source, which is the central bank. Take a look at money-less economy (MLE) chapter at https://theoryofsouls.wordpress.com/
Now might be a good time to read @kfitz’s prescient discussion of @academia https://t.co/mhbKhXZSXY #DeleteAcademiaEdu
Deleting my https://t.co/jTDtmlzw2J profile; you should think about it too: https://t.co/7FrPzc5aq0
@annettemarkham @Bali_Maha @judell @hj_dewaard (2/2) but also curious given controversy re https://t.co/i0XE2EPmUl
https://t.co/UOklGgfA0K
See also “Academia, Not Edu” by @kfitz https://t.co/mB5C8l3Fyg #AcademiaEdu #openaccess https://t.co/Mu2FcYP8be
Faculty: Have you read Why Academia not .edu? https://t.co/euovs5gtwR #openaccess @CUNYWorks
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/T3CFAkGZUT vía @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu – finding open alternatives to private academic websites https://t.co/mQqyhPYD0V
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/TggYgvJPIT via @kfitz
#sldls16 “Academia, not Edu” (Kathleen Fitzpatrick) shares some downsides to using this platform (corp. use data) https://t.co/wdtDSOCVlC
Academia, Not Edu, “share your work via the Commons” https://t.co/az8a6T0uwp via @kfitz
@JillMcCorkel The real downside of the commercial site is that they monetize your stuff, as @kfitz has pointed out https://t.co/LRxVkLciAz
Am I right in saying that one needs to become an MLA member to post work on the Core, and that this attracts an annual fee?
@JenProf @actualham @remiholden just that @academia is probably one of the biggest culprits of the data critique:
https://t.co/UOklGgfA0K
https://t.co/raTXwvny0W
An example on how to tie in tweets into your paper #hps332 #blogideas
Academia, Not Edu – Planned Obsolescence #researchgate, #academia.edu & #researchrepositories #socialmedia https://t.co/lUqiyNnLbt
@DerekVindice @academia tipped the wink by @kfitz https://t.co/PtTAKJNvL0
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/khkaVprruU
Great to talk to you today @gravesle. 2 pieces on Academia dot edu: @kfitz https://t.co/EbnAklLost @Openreflections https://t.co/57fxpzyGZ4
@Mark_A_Davidson @justamusicprof @K_Leonard_PhD @timeshighered See @kfitz’ https://t.co/5BxD4XdooQ (we launch @humcommons to all this month)
Referring in turn to @kfitz https://t.co/6MhqNLAvy0 https://t.co/FA6qXwiFo5
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/RdXug5fR9S via @kfitz
Academia, Not Edu https://t.co/RdXug5fR9S via @kfitz
“Everything that’s wrong with Facebook is wrong with Academia . edu” https://t.co/nnD2rUqNP6
Academia, Not Edu – Planned Obsolescence https://t.co/Y413TTpww6
Academia, Not Edu — This, exactly. https://t.co/85dqqvVsNq #openaccess
The dangers of for-profit academic social networks, by @kfitz (2015). https://t.co/XHpGfCZ1NT
Not a new issue (see @kfitz https://t.co/FQh7Sa44aQ), but one I’ve been thinking of more lately as I prepare to ent… https://t.co/rZd6mWq49a
Speaking of Academia dot edu: https://t.co/n3fSaqxFno @savageminds @socarxiv @trgenovese
Good article for those of us making the switch to @humcommons for our scholarly communication needs. #AMSroc17
https://t.co/ETn5uoqtad
“The first thing to note is that, despite its misleading top level domain (which was registered by a subsidiary …” https://t.co/SYB0UVNKxV
How about the fact that PhD students are required by most institutions to hand over their dissertations to ProQuest, a third-party for-profit organization, who then owns it and is free to sell it for their own profit?! Scholars can choose to use or not use academia.edu. Graduate students have no choice in this. Embargo policies vary, but are heavily in the company’s interest over the student’s. My university even admits on the library website that having your dissertation published online by ProQuest can adversely affect your publication prospects. This sort of corporate intrusion into university research and scholarship is far worse.
Pros of Ac edu : a lot of good quality papers or books, with known real and reliable academics – scholars. Not worse than a library, with bad books and bad Phd. wrong infos copied from one book to another atc. Dont forget this. Papers looks free to download.
Cons: Looks now after my own experience and some feed back read on the net like a scam site, a screw site, for the subscription. They take the money from CC or Paypal (and anyways from your bank account), and then you even cant access to the subscribed premium. This is how porn and all these scam sites work on the web. So if this is the reality of academia.edu, the site must be advised everywhere in the community as not better site as a porn site, owned by some hidden screw. that”s all.
Hi Kathleen,
Very interesting read, its a shame a .edu is being abused like that. I often see the same with .org because just anyone can buy them and legally put any type of business on it.
Take care
Jamie