Just to be clear for Matthieu, my point wasn't about services and whether people like academia.edu or not. Many of my colleagues love it. My concern is profit models and ethical and social obligations, especially differences between theirs and mine. The walled garden is reason enough for me not to opt in. I have managed to continue discovering good new work without it. On the services front, just a big +1 to the points from Daren and Rex. Also: if you want open access journals to have higher impact factors, don't just submit to them, read the and cite them. And one more thing: those of us who write tenure reviews also need to take time in our letters to argue for the significance of new publishing models when junior scholars take advantage of them. Jonathan PS -- Still, I also believe there is a place for university and independent presses: they do a lot of useful work for authors and for readers. Even the most committed digital humanists are still writing books, as are many social scientists who want to reach wider audiences. And funding for good open access journals remains an issue. -- http://sterneworks.org (apologies for iPad typos.)
On Dec 9, 2013, at 9:38, Matthieu "air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org" <air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
iefly: 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