Should We Boycott Academia.edu?

Its founder and CEO Richard Price maintains it is the ‘ largest social-publishing network for scientists ’, and ‘ larger than all its competitors put together ’. 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.edu’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thus be seen to have a parasitical relationship to a public education system from which state funding is steadily being withdrawn.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.

The abstract concluded by summarising questions which will be address at the event, including: 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?

The event was organised by The Centre for Disruptive Media and took place at Coventry University on 8 December 2015 from 3-6pm. Unfortunately I was not able to attend the event, but as this is an area of interest to me I thought I would publish this post, in which I argue that rather than boycotting Academia.edu we should make use it it (and similar services) by complementing institutional repository services with such services. Background to My Interests Over a year ago I was invited to give a talk on “ Using Social Media to Build Your Academic Career ” at a symposium in Brussels on “ How to Build an Academic Career ” for the five Flemish universities.

Over the past two years I have also given modified versions of the talk at the annual DAAD conference, the IRISS Research Unbound conference and for the iSchool@northumbria’s Research Seminar Series. As can be seen from the accompanying screenshot of one of the slides in the presentations I summarised the benefits which can be gained from making use of Academia.edu, based on personal experiences and recommending best practices.

My advice, as well as that provided by librarians and research support staff who promote use of social media by early career researchers, would appear to be in conflict with the general theme of the question “ Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu? ” event. But rather than address the issue of whether universities should own the online services they use I will present evidence of how existing services are being used and the implications of such usage patterns. What Does The Evidence Suggest? Personal Experiences The slides for my a talk on “ Using Social Media to Build Your Academic Career ” are available on Slideshare.

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In the talk I described the benefits of making one’s research content available in popular places, rather than restricting access to niche web sites such as institutional repositories. In particular I described the SEO benefits which can be gained by using popular sites which contain links to research papers which are hosted on an institutional repository.

This advice was based on findings published in a paper which asked “ Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories? ” by myself and Jenny Delasalle and presented at the Open Repositories 2012 conference. Interestingly I Googled for the paper using the search term “ linkedin academia.edu researchgate opus ” in order to find the copy of the paper hosted on Opus, the University of Bath institutional repository; however the first hit was for the copy hosted by Researchgate. This suggested that hosting a research paper on a popular service such as Academia.edu or, in this case, Researchgate, would provide better discoverability for Google than use of an institutional repository.

But since Google will remember previous searches a more objective tool to use would be Duckduckgo, which does not keep a record of previous searches. In this case the search for “ linkedin academia.edu researchgate opus ” found the paper hosted on Researchgate in second place. Using the full title of the paper, as shown the Duckduckgo search for “ Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories? ” the order of the search results was (1) paper hosted by Academia.edu; (2) paper hosted by Opus instituional repository; (3) slides hosted on Slideshare and (4) paper hosted by Researchgate.

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Personally. therefore, I have found benefits through use of Academia.edu and Researchgate in helping to raise the visibility of my research papers. But how popular in Academia.edu across the UK research sector? Institutional Evidence In order to answer this question a survey of Academia.edu use across the 24 Russell Group universities was carried out on 26 November 2015.

The findings are given in the following table, with the link in the final column enabling the current results to be determined. Ref. no. Institution No. of People Link 1 University of Birmingham 5,408 [ Link ] 2 University of Bristol 5,759 [ Link ] 3 University of Cambridge 12,770 [ Link ] 4 Cardiff University 5,372 [ Link ] 5 Durham University 5,198 [ Link ] 6 University of Exeter 5,346 [ Link ] 7 University of Edinburgh 9,252 [ Link ] 8 University of Glasgow 6,094 [ Link ] 9 Imperial College London 3,943 [ Link ] 10 King’s College London 8,568 [ Link ] 11 University of Leeds 8,396 [ Link ] 12 University of Liverpool 4,911 [ Link ] 13 London School of Economics 6,184 [ Link ] 14 University of Manchester 11,249 [ Link ] 15 Newcastle University 4,756 [ Link ] 16 University of Nottingham 7,963 [ Link ] 17 University of Oxford 19,709 [ Link ] 18 Queen Mary, University of London 4,083 [ Link ] 19 Queen’s University Belfast 2,639 [ Link ] 20 University of Sheffield 4,821 [ Link ] 21 University of Southampton 5,646 [ Link ] 22 University College London 13,481 [ Link ] 23 University of Warwick 6,457 [ Link ] 24 University of York 5,297 [ Link ] Total 173,301 Notes This information was collected on 9 December.

The figures were obtained by entering the name of the institution and using the highest number listed. As can be seen from the accompanying image there may be other variants of the name of the institution: the figure shown with therefore give an under-estimation of the number of items related to the institution (the total given in the table is for the largest variant of the

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