[Air-L] Elsevier and academia.edu

[Jonathan Sterne, Dr.]

Hi All,

I've been following these developments with interest.  A few comments.

1.  It is not true that there are no open access journals that are good to publish in, even for conservative hiring and tenure committees.  Though I guess it depends on your discipline and subfield which they might be.  I am on the editorial board of International Journal of Communication and joined precisely because I believe in the project.

2.  Publishing requires time, skill and money.  But it doesn't have to be done for profit.  There is a big difference between university presses, who are mostly money-losing operations, small independent publishers who are guided by an intellectual or political vision, and big conglomerates like elsevier who are in the business of maximizing profits.  Why we should be supporting the conglomerates is beyond me, but we should definitely be supporting university presses or a robust library-driven alternative unless you like the idea of laying out your own page proofs in the future and handling all your own copyediting, promotion, reviewing and distribution, on top of all the other duties being offloaded to faculty these days.  (this is especially important for book authors)

3.  Everything people have been saying about publishers like Elsevier being parasitic on academics' free labour is also applicable to academia.edu<http://academia.edu>.  As far as I can tell, academia.edu<http://academia.edu> is itself a for-profit operation, working on the same suspect business model as other social media sites.  They provide a "free" site that is actually very expensive to host and maintain. The site is "free" to users because user fees are actually less valuable than the data generated by users of "free" accounts, over which users have no control.  I only know of one group of potential customers for such data sets--marketers.  So once again we have advertising creeping into new media business models, except it's scholarship, a space where advertising hasn't really taken over.  Unless there's something I'm missing, the fact that they were granted a .edu address is an impressive con job, since they appear to be a .com like all the others.   If academia.edu<http://academia.edu> has another business model that doesn't involve selling its users' data to third parties over whom we have no control, or marketers as their real clients, I would like to hear about it.

4.  I have joined academia.edu<http://academia.edu> to get prepublication copies of essays.  I keep my own work on a hosted site that's easy to find in google.  That site incurs costs of all sorts, but I know what they are and what the profit-model is for the people providing me the services.  For now, I am more comfortable with those options (I could, also, host a site on my own university's servers, but there are reasons not to do that).

Best,
--Jonathan

--
Jonathan Sterne, Professor
Department of Art History and Communication Studies
McGill University

http://sterneworks.org
http://mcgill.ca/ahcs
http://media.mcgill.ca

MP3: The Meaning of a Format <http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=47544> (Duke, 2012)