[Air-L] Elsevier and academia.edu

Sun Dec 8 18:42:25 PST 2013

+1 on International Journal of Communication as a good open access journal
that doesn't have predatory practices or fees (and I'm biased, too...the
journal is based here at USC).

We have plenty of other journals in our field that are like this, too,
though they haven't quite busted into the Impact Factor and indexing game
like IJOC has in such a short time. These other open, free, peer-reviewed
options include: First Monday; Game Studies; International Journal of
Internet Science; M/C; tripleC; The Political Economy of Communication; etc.

So if you're tenured and no one is telling you you need to publish in the
Elsevier/Sage/T&F/etc. titles anymore, then why not start sending your work
exclusively to these open journals, help lift their profiles, and blaze a
path for us junior scholars to follow when we start making our tenure cases.

db

---
Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
Editor, Case Studies in Strategic Communication | www.csscjournal.org
University of Southern California
3502 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089
(213) 740-2007 office | (801) 633-4796 cell
brabham at usc.edu | www.darenbrabham.com

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Mathieu ONeil
Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2013 6:24 PM
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Elsevier and academia.edu

Hi

Briefly: not sure about comparing the enormous fees charged by Elsevier etc
to a free service like Academia. Now, granted that Academia.edu may be
profiting off users, but - apart from its social networking functions - it
does provide services since it tells you (amongst other things) (1) when
people search for your work, what search terms they use, where they come
from; (2) how many times subscribers have downloaded specific items; (3)
when people upload content that you are interested in. If it did not do
those things people would not use it. 

cheers
Mathieu
________________________________________
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] on
behalf of Jonathan Sterne, Dr. [jonathan.sterne at mcgill.ca]
Sent: Monday, December 09, 2013 1:47
To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Subject: [Air-L] Elsevier and academia.edu

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<h
 ttp://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)

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