[ecrea] EVENT: Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu?

*Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu?*

Coventry University

Tuesday 8th December 2015

3:00-6:00pm

Ellen Terry Building room ET130

With:

Janneke Adema – Chair (Coventry University, UK)

Pascal Aventurier (INRA, France)

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA/Coventry University, US)

Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK)

David Parry (Saint JosephÂ’s University, US)

Organised by /The/ /Centre for Disruptive Media/:
www.disruptivemedia.org <http://www.disruptivemedia.org/>

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

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With over 36 million visitors each month, the San
Francisco-based platform-capitalist company Academia.edu is hugely
popular with researchers. Its founder and CEO Richard Price maintains
it is the ‘largest social-publishing network for scientists
<http://fortune.com/2015/05/08/scientists-social-study/>’, and ‘larger
than all its competitors put together
<http://fortune.com/2015/05/08/scientists-social-study/>Â’. Yet 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.

Academia.eduÂ’s financial rationale rests on the ability of the
venture-capital-funded professional entrepreneurs who run it to monetize
the data flows generated by researchers. Academia.edu can thus be seen
to have a parasitical relationship to a public education system from
which state funding is steadily being withdrawn. Its business model
depends on academics largely educated and researching in the latter
system, labouring for Academia.edu for free to help build its
privately-owned for-profit platform by providing the aggregated input,
data and attention value.

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

This is all the more surprising given that when Elsevier bought the
academic social network Mendeley in 2013 (it was suggested
<http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/when-the-rebel-alliance-sells-out> 
at
the time that Elsevier was mainly interested in acquiring MendeleyÂ’s
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.

This event will address the following questions:

  * Why have researchers been so ready to campaign against for-profit
    academic publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, and
    Taylor & Francis/Informa, but not against for-profit platforms such
    as Academia.edu ResearchGate and Google Scholar?
  * Should academics refrain from providing free labour for these
    publishing companies too?
  * Are there non-profit alternatives to such commercial platforms
    academics should support instead?
  * Could they take inspiration from the editors of /Lingua /(now
    /Glossa/) and start their own scholar-owned and controlled platform
    cooperatives for the sharing of research?
  * Or are such ‘technologies of the self’ or ‘political technologies
    of individualsÂ’, as we might call them following Michel Foucault,
    merely part of a wider process by which academics are being
    transformed into connected individuals who endeavour to generate
    social, public and professional value by acting as
    microentrepreneurs of their own selves and lives?

*About the speakers*

Janneke Adema is Research Fellow in Digital Media at Coventry
University. She has published in numerouspeer-reviewed journals and
edited books including /New Formations; New Media & Society/; /The
International Journal of Cultural Studies/; /New Review of Academic
Librarianship/; /LOGOS: The Journal of the World Book Community;
/and/ Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy/. She blogs at Open
Reflections:http://www.openreflections.org/

Pascal Aventurier has been leading the Regional Scientific Information
Team at the French National Institute for Agricultural ResearchÂ’s (INRA,
France) PACA Centre since 2002. He is also co-leader of the scientific
information technology group. His focus is on research data, linked open
data, open science, knowledge management and controlled vocabularies, as
well as researching digital and social tool practices. His team is also
exploring the evolution of social networks for academic use. His recent
piece on ‘Academic social networks: challenges and opportunities’, is
available here:
http://www.unica-network.eu/sites/default/files/Academic_Social_Networks_Challenges_opportunities.pdf

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Scholarly Communication at the MLA,
and visiting professor at Coventry University. The author of /Planned
Obsolescence/
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814727883/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=plannedobsole-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0814727883> 
(2011)
she is also co-founder of the digital scholarly networkMediaCommons
<http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/>. Her recent piece on
Academia.edu, ‘Academia. Not Edu’, is available
here:http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/academia-not-edu/.

Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts, Coventry
University, UK, and co-founder of Open Humanities Press. His new
monograph, /Pirate Philosophy/, is forthcoming from MIT Press in early
2016. His recent piece on Academia.edu, ‘What Does Academia.edu’s
Success Mean for Open Access?Â’,is available here:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/10/22/does-academia-edu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant/

David Parry joined Saint Joseph's University in the Fall of 2013. His
work focuses on understanding the complex social and cultural
transformations brought about by the development of the digital network.
He is particularly interested in understanding how the internet
transforms political power and democracy. He also researches and is an
advocate for Open Access Research. His work can be found at
www.outsidethetext.com <http://www.outsidethetext.com/>.


Dr. Janneke Adema | Research Fellow Digital Media | Centre for
Disruptive Media | School of Media and Performing Arts | Faculty of Arts 
and Humanities | Coventry University |

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