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Academia is great when you need to see an article (or draft) you cannot otherwise get. As to the 'for pay' features, I just ignore them. Yes, I find it irritating to be asked if I want to know what cities the people reading my articles are from, but I´m not curious enough to pay for this information. I don´t use it a lot, and agree in principle with the concerns that have been exprerssed, but at times it is unbelievably useful!
Meg
Moreover, Academia.edu continues to pester me with their offers of fee-based premium features. It would be nice to be able to decline these offers, once and for all, rather than have them in my face every time I log into the site.
As they continue to develop and expand their for-profit business model I shall have to decide at what point their product crosses the threshold between the currently symbiotic and the foreseeable parasitic.
I would like to see more on this forum about other alternatives available out there. Is there something else worth considering?
Richard J Legault
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and cultureDear Colleagues******************************
I made this post over at mediev-l this morning in response to an inquiry about academia.edu. I hope it is not out of place to post it here too. I have no special expertise or inside knowledge, but I'd love to see some discussion about these issues, especially from those who are better informed about for-profit enterprises such as academia.edu and ResearchGate, their long-term implications for scholarship and scholarly publishing, and the business models behind them. What sorts of choices should we be making? -- Paul
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There is now widespread and growing concern about and criticism of academia.edu and ResearchGate, which are for-profit enterprises whose business strategies and future directions are unclear. Mendeley has already been bought out by the rapacious Elsevier. Googling something like "academia.edu alternatives" will turn up a large volume of these critiques. Some samples:
Existing networks, backed by tens of millions of dollars from investors, were likely to be bought up or float on the stock market, Professor Geltner claimed. Big publishers will buy them, he argued, after which academics would “no longer have control over their work”... In addition, ResearchGate and Academia.edu “want to mine your data like other tech giants”, Professor Geltner argued. This was not as obvious to users of academic social networks as it was to users of Facebook, he said. “Scholarship becomes a product,” he said.
As Kathleen Fitzpatrick... (MLA) remarked on her blog, "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." Historian Seth Denbo probably said it best when, almost a year and a half ago, he warned scholars that they were providing free data to a for-profit company rather than participating in an open-source, non-profit often associated with .edu domains.
This popularity notwithstanding, in recent weeks the Academia.edu social network in particular has been subject to a series of sharp criticisms in high-profile blog posts by concerned academics, including Gary Hall, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Guy Geltner. These led to an event held at Coventry University in December 2015 to explicitly address the question: Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu? The critiques of the bloggers focus mainly on the social networks’ business models.
The issue raised in the article is essentially this: Why should for-profit companies be allowed to generate profits from your research with little transparency? It’s a good question.
A nonprofit scholarly networking and publishing platform is being planned as an alternative to for-profit platforms such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu. The platform, called ScholarlyHub, will be member-run, but first its team must raise 500,000 euros ($579,705) to build it. The project is led by Guy Geltner, a professor of medieval history at the University of Amsterdam, who once was an avid user of Academia.edu, but who said he developed concerns about how his work or metadata collected on him might be used by for-profit companies.
The immediate attraction of academia.edu, of course, is that it has 30 million subscribers. It's working well for the present, and the mooted alternatives are merely start-ups. However, I would like to see more discussion about what we are getting ourselves involved with. The activities of Elsevier and the like are a troublesome omen for academic publishing.
There are no doubt list members much better informed about the issues than I am, and I would really welcome their views, as this is something that touches us all. -- Paul--
Paul Chandler, O.Carm.
Holy Spirit Seminary | PO Box 18 (487 Earnshaw Road) | Banyo Qld 4014 | Australia
office: (07) 3267 4804 | mobile: 044 882 4996
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