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Dear Chuck,

Thanks for your note. I’m happy to answer your questions.

CB:

(1.1) Who owns and (1.2) runs academia.edu, and (1.3) where does their funding come from? (1.4) Do you know anything about their governance from your contact with them?

KF:

(1.1) Academia.edu is a corporation, apparently privately held. The shareholders of the corporation own it. Ownership will be vested in shareholders. Depending on the structure of the funding, that ownership will be distributed in different percentages among entrepreneur-founders and external investors.

(1.2) The CEO is Richard Price. He runs Academia.edu on a day-to-day basis. He is an academic himself – some time back, he published a statement on his vision of greater access to scholarly publications across fields and across universities. Price took his PhD in philosophy at Oxford. The full senior staff is visible on the Academia.edu “about” page. Just click “about” at the bottom of any page to find it.

(1.3) The firm has $6,700,000 in external funding, most of it from three venture capital firms and several individual investors. As a tech start-up, the “funding” includes a great deal of sweat equity by the founders. Six key external investors appear on the “about” page.

(1.4) My only contact with Academia.edu is as a user. But corporate law and standard practice suggest that they are governed on usual principles: their goal is to make money, the site and its services belong to the corporation, at some time, they must find a way to monetize the value of the company – if they do not, they will have no revenue, and the service will come to an end.

CB:

(2.1) If the bibliographic database for design lay outside academia.edu and (2.2) only referenced papers posted there, (2.3) couldn't it be more secure and portable?

KF:

(2.1.1) There is confusion between bibliographic data, the bibliographic database you propose, and what Academia.edu is.

(2.1.2) Academia.edu is a host and repository for material published elsewhere. Academia.edu use a database for its own content, but it is not a database for material external to it. Academia.edu does not offer database software or facilities, and it would be impossible to build a bibliographic database using Academia.edu. It is possible to host evolving versions of a completed bibliography on Academia.edu by uploading them in .pdf or .doc format.

(2.1.3) Academia.edu is not a publisher. It is a repository that hosts versions and copies of documents published elsewhere. Academia.edu doesn’t publish author drafts of unpublished papers or such items as the bibliographies we posted. Such documents are self-published by the authors. Academia.edu hosts them. It has no copyright interests, no publishing rights, and no other rights in the documents it hosts. Academia.edu does not offer database capacity in the way that you have described it. It is a place to post papers. These papers can include our bibliographies.

(2.2.1) The value of a bibliography lies in references to the entire published literature of the field. Academia.edu is not a publisher, and the bibliography would not reference papers at Academia.edu. The bibliography would reference papers published in journals, conference proceedings, and other sources, as well as books, government reports, and other stable and accessible documents.

(2.2.2) Since authors control the use of their content on Academia.edu, the service does not provide stable or secure hosting of content. It is a temporary repository that depends on author willingness to post content. Content comes and goes as authors choose. For this reason, there would be no references to Academia.edu in a proper bibliography. References would be to the original publisher of the documentcited.

(2.3.1) If you are suggesting that the bibliography or something like it exists outside Academia.edu and will therefore be secure, this is true. The bibliography is a document. It can be hosted at many places, and in multiple versions.

(2.3.2) If, however, you are saying we should build a complete database somewhere else using currently available technology, this would not require references from a database into documents temporarily hosted by Academia.edu. It would require references from the bibliography tool to the original sources.

(2.3.3) But this project would require an investment no one is likely to make.

CB:

(3.1) Academia.edu may be more of a learning/growing experience. (3.2) But maybe we can run alongside developing what works best for us as a portal/first look/home base for our very large, not yet coherent community.

KF:

(3.1) I didn’t suggest that Academia.edu is a “learning experience” or “growing experience” for us or for out bibliographies. Academia.edu has its own purposes and values, and I think it is valuable in its own right. I see it as a useful tool for what it is. It is a repository for self-archiving by scholars and scientists across a wide range of fields. There are just over two and aquarter million registered users, and the repository contains just over one and a half million papers. The “press” section of the web site has reprints of a dozen or so useful articles that outline the issues, challenges, and problems involved in those areas of academic publishing for which Academia.edu hopes to provide solutions.

(3.2.1) A little back-of-the-envelope work suggests to me that design as a research field is still too small to support a proper research site dedicated to bibliographic compilation. A bit of demographic analysis showsthat we are not a large field. The professional field of design practice islarge. The field of design research is not. The practitioner field would not use a tool such as this. Designers work to deadlines that are too tight to permit much research. People in design research might use the tool, but the field of design research is too small for appropriate scale. It would be difficult to populate the site with rich enough content to justify the funding required. On a not-for-profit or scientific basis, charitable or government competitive funding is unlikely. There would be no way to monetize the site, and therefore no reason for a normal publisher or venture capital firm to invest.

(3.2.2) If I were a venture capitalist or I worked at a funding agency, I’d ask for proof of concept. I’d want to know what the bibliography would contain, what it would do, what some samples looked like, and most ofall, I’d want to know whether the field would actually use or populate such a tool with content. To be blunt, neither your bibliography or my own would convince me – these do not show even as much well-structured, useful and informative content as you described yesterday. To win serious funding, one would need bibliographies that meet several criteria. Having developed reference tools, I would want to see proof of concept in a simple way: I’d ask to see whether the field itself has already produced fifty usable stand-alone bibliographies where each bibliography meets a set of criteria to justify investing further in the field. Right now, the answer would be no.

Until our field produces enough visible, accessible bibliographies that are topical, well structured, and of high quality, it is unlikely that anyone can justify the expense and time required for a sophisticated web-based tool.

If you are interested in a model of what an accessible, first-rate open access bibliography looks like, I’d suggest the The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. You can see it at URL:

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html

This bibliography is 16 years old now, and it has expanded through many regularly updated editions. It is the work of a single author-editor, Charles Bailey. The latest version has over 1,400 entries. In its field, this bibliography is the gold standard reference tool. This is the kind of useful, well-structured thematic bibliography that is useful. It is not an annotated bibliography, so it meets your criteria.

You can use or search online. To see what it looks like in printable form, download the free PDF of the 2010 edition.

If you’d like to read more about how Bailey did it and why, go to URL:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0007.201

So far, our field has produced few documents such as this.

If we are serious about the need for such a tool, then we need to see several dozen people step up to say, “I know what this takes. I have completed a proof-of-concept bibliography on the subject of my expertise. Here it is.”

Instead, it seems to me that every is saying, “It would be wonderful if someone were to build such a tool. If someone builds such a tool, I’ll be happy to contribute to it.” So far, Mendeley and Zotero demonstrate that very few people in the design field actually contribute.

To say, “It would be great for someone else to do this,” is not a proof-of-concept statement.

This is what a proof-of-concept statement looks like:

“Here is a stack of 50 bibliographies for the design research field. I’ve done it. This is my proof. And here are 49 more like it to show that the field will get it done.”

For any number of reasons, the field of design research is not yet mature enough to do this.

Rather than develop a technological tool for a system with no content, why not start with the content? Where are the other 48 bibliographies?

Ken

Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China

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