Document Type

Presentation

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Publication Date

3-22-2017

Disciplines

Library and Information Science

Description, Abstract, or Artist's Statement

It’s tempting to view academic social networking sites (ASNS) -- such as Academia.edu -- as rivals to library publishing efforts. They compete for faculty attention and operate under dubious intentions. On their website, Academia.edu claims “the company's mission is to accelerate the world's research” but Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association, points out that “Academia.edu is not an educationally-affiliated organization, but a dot-com, which has raised millions in multiple rounds of venture capital funding” while Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts and Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University (U.K.) asserts that its ultimate goal is to profit from data metrics generated by the use of the research and scholarship freely given to the site by unwitting users who simply want to share their work. Ultimately, the integrity of Academia.edu is questionable. In a self-published paper -- formatted to look very much like a peer-reviewed journal article, but in fact is not -- the company boasts that papers posted on their site receive 49% more citations than papers posted on other online platforms, but the data is suspect, the information clearly biased, the end result not credible.

Despite these significant problems, faculty are using Academia.edu and other ASNS, and in ever-increasing numbers. Rather than ignore or dismiss outright these sites in conversations with faculty, might they serve as opportunities to engage our academic communities in fruitful dialogue about the value of library-led publishing initiatives? How can we leverage their existence -- and their complications -- as we talk with faculty about authors’ rights, scholarly communication, and open access? Might we begin to transform understanding and usage of these sites (such as rote uploading of one’s work) into more critically, nuanced reflection and application (such as linking out to one’s work in an institutional repository)?

Notes

Presentation at the 2017 Library Publishing Forum

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