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Background

Page history last edited by Janneke 8 years ago

 

 

 

This section provides some background to the development of various academic social networking sites (SNS), as well as highlighting some of the ongoing discussions regarding certain aspects of their continuing development. It provides information about: the business models and capital behind for-profit academic SNS; discussions relating to the new reputation metrics and systems introduced during their development; and plans to implement new commentary and review functions.

 

 

Business Models, Acquisitions and Venture Capitalist Backing

 

Mendeley Bought by Elsevier

 

Mendeley was founded by 3 scholars in 2008 as a reference management and PDF-organisation system with the intention to stimulate the open sharing of research. In 2013 it was acquired by the academic publishing giant Elsevier, known for its profit-driven and (up-to-then) closed-science stance. The New Yorker wrote that this acquisition might have been an attempt by Elsevier to squash Mendeley, but in retrospect the other reason given by The New Yorker for Elsevier wanting to buy Mendeley seems more likely: 'to possess the aggregated data that Mendeley’s users generate with all of their searching and sharing'. This take-over let to outcries among many scholars, who felt betrayed by the platform. As social media scholar danah boyd wrote:

 

'I genuinely like Mendeley as a product, but I will not support today’s Elsevier no matter how good a product of theirs is. Perhaps they’ll change. I wouldn’t bet on it, but I am open to the possibility.  But right now, I don’t believe in the ethics and commitments of the company nor do I believe that they’re on the precipice of meaningful change. As minimally symbolic as it is, I refuse to strengthen them with my data or money. This means that I will quit Mendeley now that they’re part of Elsevier.'  

 

 

Venture Capitalist Backing

 

 

As MLA Director and scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick has argued, 'despite its misleading top level domain (which was registered by a subsidiary prior to the 2001 restrictions, Academia.edu is not an educationally-affiliated organization, but a dot-com, which has raised millions in multiple rounds of venture capital funding'. Both Academia.edu and ResearchGate, to name just two of the biggest academic SNS, are backed by millions of venture capital. As Fitzpatrick emphasises: 'This does not imply anything necessarily negative about the network’s model or intent, but it does make clear that there are a limited number of options for the network’s future: at some point, it will be required to turn a profit, or it will be sold for parts, or it will shut down.' 

 

 

 

Experiments in Peer Review

 

 

Many Academic SNS have been incremental in pushing forward the discussion on open and post-publication review. Nonetheless, criticism from the academic community focuses on how some of these more speedy and P2P peer review solutions might actually be part of a strategy to further 'outsource' peer review and its organisation, and to create new revenue models based on these alternative forms of review. As Martin Eve remarks about these changes to peer review, 'eminent thinkers on the reform of this system, such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick, have been careful to point out that while a social system of recommendation and review (“peer-to-peer review”) might work better than existing structures, such measures must be carefully designed.' Eve remains sceptical of Academia.edu's experiments in this respect, not only because he fears 'that an uncareful implementation may cause an academic backlash against the potential benefits in transforming peer review/adding social discoverability/curational approaches', but also because on for-profit SNS 'the action of “liking” or “recommending” is part of a data-collection exercise that profiles user behaviour', and Eve remains unsure what Academia.edu will do with this data. In this respect Eve argues that he 'would prefer for the evolution of peer review to be in the hands of organizations whose motivations are not divided between the good of scholarship and venture capital exit strategies'.

 

 

#DeleteAcademiaEdu Twitter-Storm 

 

At the end of January 2016 Academia.edu contacted some of its prime users and editors via email and proposed the idea of charging a fee to users to have their papers considered for recommendation by its editors. This suggestion that was heavily criticised by the academic community. This spawned the #DeleteAcademiaEdu hashtag on Twitter, urging users to delete their Academia.edu accounts. See also: Corinne Ruff, 'Scholars Criticize Academia.edu Proposal to Charge Authors for Recommendations', The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 29, 2016. http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Criticize/235102

 

 

 

Alternative Academic Reputation, Analytics and Metric Systems

 

Academic SNS have invested heavily in developing new and alternative metrics to measure research engagement, uptake, sharing and impact. ResearcGate has the RG Score for example, and 'Reads'; while Academia.Edu provides 'AuthorRank' and 'PaperRank' metrics. There has been some criticism about the transparency of the underlying algorithms that determine these metrics, however, and about how these scores or metrics have been calculated, and whether they measure individual authors, their publications, their interactions, or the journals in which these papers have been published.

 

 

 

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