{"id":3268,"date":"2015-11-30T10:11:58","date_gmt":"2015-11-30T10:11:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openreflections.wordpress.com\/?p=3268"},"modified":"2015-11-30T10:11:58","modified_gmt":"2015-11-30T10:11:58","slug":"why-are-we-not-boycotting-academia-edu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openreflections.org\/?p=3268","title":{"rendered":"Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"college-grad\"With:<\/em><\/p>\n

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Janneke Adema \u2013 Chair (Coventry University, UK)<\/p>\n

Pascal Aventurier (INRA, France)<\/p>\n

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA\/Coventry University, US)<\/p>\n

Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK)<\/p>\n

David Parry (Saint Joseph’s University, US)<\/p>\n

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Registration: http:\/\/why-are-we-not-boycotting-academia-edu.eventbrite.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n

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Organised by The<\/i> Centre for Disruptive Media<\/i>: www.disruptivemedia.org.uk<\/a><\/p>\n

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Schedule:<\/em><\/p>\n

3:00-3:30:\u00a0 \u00a0 Registration tea\/coffee<\/div>\n
3:30-3:40:\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Introduction (Janneke Adema)<\/div>\n
3:40-4:00:\u00a0 \u00a0 Pascal Aventurier<\/div>\n
4:00-4:20:\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Kathleen Fitzpatrick (via Skype)<\/div>\n
4:20-4:35:\u00a0 \u00a0 Break<\/div>\n
4:35-4:55:\u00a0 \u00a0 Gary Hall<\/div>\n
4:55-5:15: \u00a0 \u00a0David Parry (via Skype)<\/div>\n
5:15-6:00: \u00a0 \u00a0Discussion<\/div>\n
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With\u00a0over 36 million\u00a0visitors each month, the\u00a0San Francisco-based\u00a0platform-capitalist company Academia.edu is hugely popular with researchers. Its founder and CEO Richard Price maintains it is the\u00a0\u2018largest social-publishing network for scientists<\/a>\u2019, and \u2018larger than all its competitors put together<\/a>\u2019.\u00a0Yet posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository, which is how it is often understood by academics.<\/p>\n

Academia.edu\u2019s financial rationale\u00a0rests\u00a0on the\u00a0ability of\u00a0the venture-capital-funded professional entrepreneurs\u00a0who run\u00a0it to monetize the data flows generated by researchers.\u00a0Academia.edu can thus\u00a0be seen to have a parasitical relationship to\u00a0a public education system from which state funding is\u00a0steadily being withdrawn. Its business model depends on\u00a0academics largely educated and researching in the latter system, labouring for Academia.edu for free to\u00a0help build its privately-owned for-profit platform by providing the aggregated input, data and attention value.<\/p>\n

To date over 15,000 researchers\u00a0have taken a stand against\u00a0the publisher Elsevier by adding their name to the list on the Cost of Knowledge<\/a> website demanding they change how they operate. Just recently 6 editors and 31 editorial-board members of one of Elsevier’s journals,\u00a0Lingua<\/i>, went so far as to resign, leading to calls for a boycott and for support for Glossa<\/i>, the open access journal they plan to start instead. By contrast, the business practices\u00a0of\u00a0Academia.edu have gone largely uncontested.<\/p>\n

This is all the more surprising given that when Elsevier bought the academic social network Mendeley in 2013 (it was suggested<\/a> at the time that Elsevier was mainly interested in acquiring Mendeley\u2019s user data), many academics deleted their profiles out of protest. Yet generating revenue from the exploitation of user data is exactly the business model underlying academic social networks such as Academia.edu.<\/p>\n

This event will address the following questions:<\/p>\n