
Should This Be the Last Thing You Read on Academia.edu? - Petiver
https://www.academia.edu/16959788/Should_This_Be_the_Last_Thing_You_Read_on_Academia.edu
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rubidium
Corporations being central to the operations of academia is bad news. It's bad
now with Elsevier and its ilk. It'll be bad in the future if Academia.edu
starts mattering for tenure.

Here's the solution. It's a steep climb.

Persuasive academics need to start convincing people with money to donate
millions and millions to not-for-profit collaborations of universities and
government research entities to start open research and open-source journals.
Truly altruistic people need to start and run these journals, convinced of
their mission of providing open research to all the world. They need to be
motivated by the mission. The money needs to be there too. But given the
choice between optimizing selling widgets for Amazon, or providing the world
with free access to all research the world over... what job would you choose?

The gov't could support it too, but I'd rather their support go towards actual
research than a collaboration. There's too much bureaucracy when you take
money from the gov't.

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3JPLW
So the central argument seems to be that Academia.edu profits from the
patterns of access and related metadata that academics generate as they do
their daily work. Academia.edu then sells this data to private R&D companies
to point them in the direction that the academics are moving.

Even after reading through this paper, I'm not convinced that this is
inherently a bad thing. Many corporations ( _cough Elsevier cough_ ) profit
off the backs of publicly-funded academics in much more pernicious ways.

Now, if Academia.edu were allowing companies to purchase the specific page-
views of specific researchers (or allows subsetting the data specifically
enough to target one group with decent confidence), then that would be very
damning. I suppose I should go re-read the privacy policy:
[https://www.academia.edu/privacy](https://www.academia.edu/privacy).

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hga
While I'm sure there are antecedents, going as far back as Heinlein in the
'50s, making use of the firehouse of information being produced by academics
and researchers has been identified as a _big_ problem. If Academia.edu can
help with this, without doing objectively evil stuff, more power to them.

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cantlin
Centralisation of process isn't just about dollars for data. Yes, for the
business model to work, the company has to gather a lot of data that it can
look at all at once. But that's perfectly possible to do through a network of
services, even services you don't own. See ad-servers.

Centralisation on the product level – that is, all activity happens on this
particular piece of user facing software – is also a function of ease of use.
If a thing is being accomplished by a distributed set of different interfaces,
each with their own rules of the road, then there's significant pain for the
end user in navigating all of that. In this way, good UX is naturally
monopolistic.

Disclaimer: I briefly worked for Academia.edu a few years back.

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schappim
Anyone have a link that doesn't require a signup?

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devnonymous
I just had to scroll ...yet to read the thing though.

~~~
strictnein
Yeah, took me a while to figure that out. The page resizes to fill 100% of
your browser window, with the little "Read Paper (down arrow)" link a slightly
different shade of gray vs the background. Kind of shady really.

