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<http://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)
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@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] on behalf of Jonathan Sterne, Dr. [jonathan.sterne@mcgill.ca] Sent: Monday, December 09, 2013 1:47 To: <air-l@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) _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
+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@usc.edu | www.darenbrabham.com -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Mathieu ONeil Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2013 6:24 PM To: <air-l@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@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] on behalf of Jonathan Sterne, Dr. [jonathan.sterne@mcgill.ca] Sent: Monday, December 09, 2013 1:47 To: <air-l@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) _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
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@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@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] on behalf of Jonathan Sterne, Dr. [jonathan.sterne@mcgill.ca] Sent: Monday, December 09, 2013 1:47 To: <air-l@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)
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Hi List, Interesting discussion. I agree with statement below: "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." My main issue with academia.edu is that it appears to be yet another walled garden. This is a bit off topic, but I also didn't like their feature (I'm sure used elsewhere, but I first saw it with academia.edu) that when you search for someone on google and click the link to their academia.edu page, the person receives an email from academia.edu saying words to effect: "someone from X just searched for you on google", where X is the country. I stopped clicking through to academia.edu when I realised this. Rob -- Dr Robert Ackland Associate Professor and Deputy Director (Education) Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute Australian National University homepage: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/ackland-rj project: http://voson.anu.edu.au<http://voson.anu.edu.au/> On 09/12/13 13:42, Rex Troumbley wrote: 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><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
participants (5)
-
Daren Brabham -
Jonathan Sterne, Dr. -
Mathieu ONeil -
Rex Troumbley -
Robert Ackland