[Air-L] Elsevier and academia.edu

[Robert Ackland]

I see this thread as having two themes: (1) open access publishing, (2) the role of the online social network academia.edu.

On theme (2), as has been stated already, academia.edu is yet another walled garden.  Yes the walls are easy to scale on the way in, but the problem is when you want to leave and you are faced with taking a hit on your academic visibility and having to re-establish your web presence somewhere else.  Hotel California anyone?  The other issue is that yes, online social networks (OSN) are expensive to run and users want improved features which cost money to develop, and so the company owning the OSN needs to monetise the data and hence we become the product.

What can be done about this?

There are P2P currencies (e.g. bitcoin) and file sharing (e.g. bittorrent) which enable useful services to be run in a completely decentralised manner so that the costs of running the service are distributed across many providers and no single provider can control the service.

A search on "P2P 'online social network'" revealed several potential solutions.  On the first page of results:

- "My3: A highly-available P2P-based online social network" (Narendula, Papaioannou, and Aber) - http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/167512/files/demo.pdf‎

- "LifeSocial.KOM: A Secure and P2P-based Solution for Online Social Networks" (Graffi, Gross, Stingl, Hartung, Kovacevic, and Steinmetz)

- Decentralized Online Social Networks - http://sands.sce.ntu.edu.sg/dOSN/

If anyone is interested in setting up a P2P OSN for academics, I'd be willing to contribute time and server resources.  Perhaps there is already one out there I can join and contribute to?  Of course the network effect means that the utility of joining an OSN is dependent on how many colleagues are already there, and so there are disincentives for being a first mover, once a provider has already gained significant market share (which academia.com has).

Rob

Assoc. Prof. Robert Ackland
Deputy Director (Education)
Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute
Australian National University