Reflecting on the recent surge of criticism about the commercial motives of scholarly social media platform Academia.edu, Paolo Mangiafico argues this is now an ideal opportunity for scholars to make informed choices about their work. If you are comfortable with the trade-offs and risks, and willing to exchange those for the service provided, then don’t #DeleteAcademiaEdu. But consider whether alternatives exist that will meet your needs while also preserving your ability to keep control of your work

Mangiafico, Paolo

LSE Research Online

blogs.lse.ac.uk http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/02/01/should-you-deleteacademiaedu/Should you #DeleteAcademiaEdu? On the role of commercialservices in scholarly communication.Reflecting on the recent surge of criticism about the commercial motives of scholarly social mediaplatform Academia.edu, Paolo Mangiafico argues this is now an ideal opportunity for scholars tomake informed choices about their work. If you are comfortable with the trade-offs and risks, andwilling to exchange those for the service provided, then don’t #DeleteAcademiaEdu. Butconsider whether alternatives exist that will meet your needs while also preserving your ability tokeep control of your work.Last week a kerfuffle arose on Twitter about Academia.edu, a social networking site for academics,where many academic authors have profiles, share their publications, and connect with other scholars. You can readabout the beginning of the controversy in this article the Chronicle of Higher Education posted on Friday.The ensuing tweetstorm followed a fairly typical trajectory – moral outrage, call to action, a hashtag, and then ofcourse the inevitable backlash, with each side calling into question the integrity of each other’s motivations, or at leastthe consistency of their actions. The chief concern, or at least the one that appears to have caused the most heateddebate initially, was whether paying for promotion of one’s scholarly work was equivalent to “vanity publishing”, butthe discussion evolved into the broader issue of whether the fact that Academia.edu is a commercial service meantacademics should avoid it, with several people on Twitter calling that out as hypocrisy, given the many othercommercial transactions that academic life is entangled with.Image credit: Kate Ter Haar CC BYMy own opinion is that this is a straw man argument, and it misses an opportunity to have a more nuanced discussionabout what’s really at stake here. This isn’t a morality play, and it’s not about whether charging for “monetizing”something is in itself a bad thing – for me it’s about choices, and making informed choices about keeping or cedingcontrol to one’s own work. It’s also about being open vs being closed. Despite the impression that#DeleteAcademiaEdu is just railing against capitalism, I’d argue that it’s really about promoting a more competitivemarketplace, one where the data is open for any number of potential services (consortial, member-supported, or evencommercial) to do interesting and useful things with it – may the best service win, or may many complementaryservices thrive.The challenge with sites like Academia.edu is that this is not possible. By most accounts, Academia.edu is a fineservice, and clearly it’s meeting a need, as the number of academics who have profiles in it shows. They are doingvery well at motivating academics to put their profile data and publications there. But what happens to that informationonce it’s there? By my read of the site’s terms of service, no other uses can be made of what you’ve put there – it’s upto Academia.edu to decide what you can and can’t do with the information you’ve given them, and they’re not likely tomake it easy for alternative methods of access (why would they?). There doesn’t appear to be a public API, and youneed to be logged in to do most of the useful things on the site (even as a casual reader). They were among the firstto create enough value for academics to encourage them to sign up, and kudos to them for that, but does that meanyour profile data and publications should be exclusively available via their platform? This is what’s called “vendor lock-in” – it’s very good for the vendor, not so good for the users.While it’s understandable that companies will try to recoup their investments through such approaches, it nonethelessgoes against the ethos of academia, and of how the Internet functions best. A few years ago at a conference I heard aspeaker say“On the Internet the opposite of ‘open’ is not ‘closed’ – the opposite of ‘open’ is ‘broken’ ” – (If Iremember correctly, it was John Wilbanks)So when I first started reading some tweets about people deleting their Academia.edu accounts, I tweeted:VIVO is an open source, open access, community-based, member-supported profile system for academics. It hasbeen implemented by many universities and research organizations, and makes linked open data available foraccess and integration across implementations. In some institutions, like my own, it is connected to our open accessinstitutional repository, so Duke researchers can easily make the full text of their publications be linked directly fromtheir profile – open to anyone, no login required, always in the author’s control. And the custodians of the system andthe data are the researcher’s home institution, as well as…  well, here I’ll quote from an article Kevin Smith and Iwrote a couple of years ago:“this brings us to a discussion of another major player in this ecosystem that we have not yetaddressed—a set of organizations that are mission driven, rather than market driven; that are widelydistributed and independently operated, and therefore less vulnerable to single points of failure, andthat were designed to be stable over long periods of time; that are catholic in their scope, strongsupporters of intellectual freedom, and opponents of censorship and other restrictions on access toknowledge; and that are in full alignment with the mission of learning, teaching, and research thatconstitutes the primary reason why authors write academic articles. We are, of course, talking aboutlibraries.”This, ultimately, is why I think scholars will be better served by having the core data for their profiles and theirresearch tied to open systems like VIVO, and to their universities and their libraries. Sure, the interfaces might not beas elegant, and we might move more slowly than a commercial service, but we’re in it for the long haul, we shareyour values, and we’re not going to try to lock in your data.If someone wants to harvest the data from VIVO and our repositoryand layer on a better social networking or indexing service, that’sgreat – the data is available for that, and we have an open API. Doyou want to charge for the service? No problem, as long as thepeople you’re charging know that they’re paying for your serviceadd-ons, and not the data itself, which remains open and free toanyone else to use it outside the paid service. Do you have aservice (like Academia.edu) that’s really good at convincing authorsto enter their CV and upload their articles? Wonderful – make thedata available unencumbered, and we might be willing to pay you todo the collecting for us (especially since institutional repositorieshaven’t been as successful in doing so).The key reasons why authors should choose first to work with theirscholarly communities rather than purely commercial enterprisesisn’t that making money is bad – we all have to earn a living – butthat the goals and values aren’t necessarily in alignment. I’ve used alot of words to say something that Katie Fortney and Justin Gonder said in December (in “ A social networking site isnot an open access repository”) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick said a few months before that (in “ Academia, Not Edu”), butthe Twitter discussion sparked has made many more people aware of this issue, so I wanted to underline theseideas, and say a bit more about it than would fit in my tweets last week.You have a choice, and the choice I hope you will think more about is whether you feel more comfortable investingyour time and efforts with your home institution and your library, whose incentives and values presumably align withyour own, and who will contribute to an open ecosystem, or with a service whose incentives and values and life spanare unknown, and whose business model relies on being closed. If you’re comfortable with the trade-offs and risks,and willing to exchange those for the service provided, then don’t #DeleteAcademiaEdu. But I hope you will use thisopportunity to look into whether alternatives exist that will meet your needs while keeping your options open and yourdata open, and preserving your ability to keep control of your work and make sure it’s not helping sustain anecosystem that’s broken.——If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll also tolerate this shameless plug for an upcoming event that will be a forum foraddressing many of the issues discussed above – the Scholarly Communication Institute. The theme of SCI 2016, tobe held in Chapel Hill, NC, in October, is “Incentives, Economics, and Values: Changing the Political Economyof Scholarly Publishing.” We invite teams to submit proposals of projects they’d like to work on that fit this theme,and to build a dream team of participants they’d like to spend 4 days with working on it. For proposals that areselected, we pay expenses (thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) for the team to come to theNorth Carolina Research Triangle and work on their project alongside several other similar teams, in an institute that’spart retreat, part seminar, part unconference, and part development sprint. You can find out more about the institute attrianglesci.org –proposals are due March 14, so if you’re interested, start putting together your team soon.This piece originally appeared on the Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog and is reposted under CC BY-NC-SANote: This article gives the views of the author(s), and not the position of the LSE Impact blog, nor of the LondonSchool of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.About the Author:Paolo Mangiafico serves as Coordinator of Scholarly Communication Technologies at Duke University Libraries, andas lead organizer for the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute. His current work focuses on how newtechnologies can be adapted to further the knowledge-sharing mission of research universities, and the intersectionbetween social, economic, and technical systems.Copyright 2015 LSE Impact of Social Sciences - Unless otherwise stated, this work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution Unported 3.0 License.

Should you #DeleteAcademiaEdu?: on the role of commercial services in scholarly communication.

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

LSE Research Online

DukeSpace (Duke Univ.)