Dear Chris,

Your comments are serious and thoughtful. They deserve consideration. Without disagreeing, I’m going to bring up a few careful points.

PLOS is terrific. It is a not-for-profit organisation, but PLOS is not free. The PLOS journals charge publication fees that run between $1,490 USD and $2,900 USD depending on the journal. PLOS is not a repository. It is a suite of peer-reviewed journals.

While I agree on the ethos of universities and academia as not-for-profit organisations that advocate free sharing of information, the fact remains that creating and managing these organisations is a very big business indeed. The first universities were generally established by emperors, kings, princes, and popes, and they served the needs of church and state. The students were often the sons — never the daughters — of wealthy magnates, or else students and clergymen hoping for advancement at the courts of royalty and nobility, or in the church. As times changed, governments and private foundations entered the university business. Even with all the money lavished on universities to enable the sharing of freeware, universities still charge massive fees to students and other users. The ethos of freedom comes at a price. 

The contradictions that appear in Academia.edu appear in other guises when the not-for-profit sector organises itself to provide free services. While these services are free, they are generally free to the rest of us who are fortunate enough to work in the not-for-profit sector. Many of us earn a good living funded by the wealthy benefactors and governments who succeeded kings and popes as the trustees of our not-for-profit universities.

As Morgan Freeman said in the movie Thick as Thieves, “I’m just saying, is all.”

Freeman played the role of Ripley, a high-end thief … I sometimes feel we are all implicated, whether it’s the guys hustling at Academia.edu, the folks charging significant publication fees at PLOS, or the extraordinarily wealthy university sector. We’re all doing good of one kind or another — and we’re all charging someone by monetising these services in some way.

I agree with you on most of the points you bring up. At the same time, each of these points has a dialectical flip side, and I am also aware of those facts. 

“Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.”

— Bob Dylan

https://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/desolation-row

Yours,

Ken   

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/

Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia

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Chris Csikszentmihalyi wrote:

—snip—

I agree with Ken that SAR's RC is not likely to scale the way Academia’s has, and frankly I like the multidisciplinary dimension of the commercial service. Other than that, I completely disagree with Ken's definition of "public service."

Birger's point is excellent: without access to the search algorithms, without the ability to replicate or modify Academia's system, without  transparency of their operations, why on earth would scholars be trusting it?* We hold our academic institutions and professional organizations to much higher standards.

It would be worthwhile for anyone interested to take a look at some of Trebor Scholz's work in "platform cooperativism," which he recently worked through in a conference at the New School. I've similarly done work building software platforms as virtual "unions" of people in the same situation. Academia is a counter to the forces of for-profit markets: it has built jobs, buildings, libraries, culture oriented around free (as in freedom) sharing of information.  Must we now route all our communications though commercial enterprises that have no such interests?

[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">https:[log in to unmask]

But moreover we have some great parallel examples.  PLOS (

https://www.plos.org/

) is an incredible nonprofit initiative that is certainly scaling well ("11.6+ million views and 1.9+ million articles downloaded monthly"), and it publishing many very high impact papers. Zotero seems to be doing quite well, 1.5 million users in 2014.

I do think it would be possible to build a scaled interdisciplinary research sharing platform using free/libre techniques, perhaps using distributed approaches similar to bittorrents so that article hosting and communications costs would be much less than a centralized system. Similar attempts to build social media systems (identi.ca, diaspora) have not succeeded in attracting a great range of users. This domain is different than Facebook, however. Academics have often been okay using systems (and fashions) no one else is using. Moreover, the platform itself could be used as a site of experimentation, development of new initiatives to augment/replace it... and of course transparent governance.

But we would have to act quickly.

—snip—

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