[Air-L] Elsevier and academia.edu

Sun Dec 8 18:42:26 PST 2013

Hi all,

This has been an interesting and timely debate. I'll contribute by pointing
out that academics usually write for impact and not money, which allows
them to focus on obscure subjects or unpopular research topics rather than
on what sells. Unfortunately, we have allowed public gifts from the writers
and reviewers to be turned into commodities by groups who have added the
least to the process of producing knowledge. Peter Suber pointed out in his
excellent book on Open Access <http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access> that
some of the largest journal publishers earn higher profits than big oil
companies.

Perhaps too much energy has been wasted defending the peer-review process
or the value of editors (when they've never really been under attack) which
might have been better directed towards creating a commercial-free academic
commons. It seems to me that the question shouldn't be whether or not
Academia.edu treats us well (or treats us better than commercial
publishers), but whether Academia.edu is really the best we can do? I might
be a hopeless optimist, but I think we can do better.

Rex Troumbley, PhD Candidate
Department of Political Science
University of Hawaii at Manoa

On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 4:24 PM, Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil at anu.edu.au>wrote:

> 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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