Looks like I'm gone again. It's time to change, new forms and new directions. Like the revolution, I move elsewhere and yet carry on.
Academia.edu used to be a refreshing and very useful platform for academics and students all over the world. That has ended with academia.edu introducing the ‘paid search’.
'The academic production of knowledge should not be used to make profit, but to improve society.' I share my work freely, and draw on the work of others. All human beings desire to know, said Aristotle in the opening to the Metaphysics. There is a common moral reason; we share knowledge out of a commitment to share the world we have in common. That was why I was glad to put all the work I have done over the years onto Academia. Of course, I knew fine well that one day that the forces of commerce, like the devil's riding crop, would not be far behind. Where there are people, there are profits. Do you think that Col. Tom Parker loved Elvis for his music or for the interest his music created?
'This publishing practice was the direct cause of the success of Academia.edu. That social network site for academics allowed academics to build a network, to upload their papers, books and projects and search for new content. All for free.'
I built a network, made contact with academics and students, exchanged work and views, found an audience, made an impact.
'In the last 5 years, Academia has been a useful educational tool. Lecturers suggest their students to make a profile so that they have access to an enormous amount of papers and other content. It showed the democratic and educational potential of a social network site.'
That educational and democratic potential is key, for me. It's one of the many reasons I love Rousseau, the way that he emphasizes that the truth cannot just be given but must be actively willed - law and reason for him are educative. A social network is how we do it.
And for a while I was doing it. I really had a good innings.
'The problem with Academia.edu is that it is a commercial enterprise. It is not created to serve the common good – diffusing knowledge. It is also not created to serve democratic ideals, but to make money. And like almost all such ‘user-generated content sites’ they start as dot.communism but almost overnight turn into dot.capitalism, to paraphrase Van Dijk.'
Yet again, our cooperative instincts are hijacked and diverted to private ends, our natural communism exploited as an unnatural commercialism. And I'm gone, with the hare in the wind.
I neither buy nor sell. My business adviser at St Helens Chamber of Commerce, Caroline, read my work, declared me a genius, and advised me to ‘monetize’ my writings and make a million. It was good advice. Instead, I continued to follow my trail of thought wherever led. Let it flow and let it grow. It led to a “Top 0.1%” ranking on Academia, as well as constant contact with students and researchers as they pursued their myriad projects, and drew on my ideas. I hope I have informed and entertained along the way, given thinkers and practitioners food for thought and action. With a few exceptions, I haven’t written for causes and forums over the years and have remained independent. I have a view which would make those who a precise and particular agenda to promote uncomfortable. I don't quite fit anywhere. I’m happy with that. Things are gonna slide in all directions, said Leonard Cohen, so much chaos and confusion there won't be any clear sides to take. The centre, the common ground, needs to be put back together - that's where I stand. It means that I am free to write in a way that follows up the thoughts I have as I think issues through. I am beholden to no earthly power or authority, beyond those worthy of a respect that remains conscious and critical. I’m not very good in being faithful to any party line or dogma, never have been and never will be. I reserve the right to make an argument without being concerned about loyalty or letting a side down. I have done that in the past, and it has blunted the edge of my thinking, cost me in the eyes of critical friends, and earned me nothing by way of respect from those I have sought to support.
I noticed a while ago that Academia were drumming up business, inducing me to ‘upgrade’ for all many of promises of good things. There was the clear appeal to academic vanity, of course, pay money to find out who was reading and citing your work, what institutions were interested, pay more money out to spread your name, become academically respectable, boost your academic ego. I have none. I could care less. When I needed to impress people academically, I did. When I needed top grades, I got them. Big deal.
I ignored every single appeal. I am not remotely interested. It is always about the ideas for me, exchanging views with others, learning from others, offering something of my own, participating in a Republic of Letters. I’ve enjoyed it, enjoyed the contact with those scholars who have the root of the matter in them. I found when it came to my own tutoring business that I could never put a price on ideas. I tried it. I was hopeless! I didn’t like it. I’m just not cut out to be an industrialist of ideas, grinding out ideas for dollars in the academy as factory. And so I noticed the drop in hits and downloads. I used to get 500 plus a day. The numbers dropped, followed by the commercials promising all manner of benefits from upgrading. I refuse to pay. The numbers dropped, to a 100, then halved. As every month passed I was told the % drop in interest. And so I dwindled away. My Philosophizing through the Eye of the Mind hit 30,000 within a year of being posted, my Rousseau’s and Lewis Mumford’s hit 5,000. Then next to nothing as the months, then years passed. And now, when I consult the Analytics, where once there was an endless list of the traffic my work was generating, now I get “You haven't had any visitors recently.” I’ve had 30 mentions, I’m told, with the message “upgrade to view.” In other words, “pay!” Everything comes with a price. Don’t pay? Go away.
So there it is. I don’t generate any money for the company, I’m not a cash source, so I am dispensable and disposable. And now I’ve been cut off and discarded. I face the prospect of watching my work just fade away, myself with it.
I have been toying for years with the idea of forming my own e-publishing company. That was the point of working with the local Chamber of Commerce. That may well still be the way to go, promote myself more actively and aggressively than I do. But it was never about making money for me. The world is ending and everyone has a book to offer. I still don’t buy or sell. I'd rather fade away into my own little community, offering my views for free in person over the garden wall or in the pub. It has been remarkable that I got this far with my approach and activities. I’m having to check other options now. I’ve had a long and successful run.
I now see that the site won't let me upload new work to my own page, shunting me off into some nether region where I have no followers, no contacts, where I exist as a non-person. So be it, for now. I'll be haring away somewhere else shortly.
There are a number of open access alternatives. I use Research Gate and Mendeley. There are also these to check out:
https://hcommons.org and
www.openlibhums.org.
There are also an increasing number of open access quality book publishers being established.
I've published elsewhere, but here are the links on Academia anyway. I give the Research Gate links underneath.
Marx’s Socialism from Within, three volumes
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325999612_Social_Restitution_and_Metabolic_Restoration_in_the_Thought_of_Karl_Marx
Volume One of Marx's Socialism from Within.
In this work I recover the ecological dimension of Marx's critique of political economy. Within the triadic framework of humanity-labour/production-nature, I demonstrate that Marx goes beyond the abstractions of 'Man,' 'Reason,' and 'Nature' to place the emphasis upon mediation. Focusing upon the alienated character of capital's second order mediations, Marx reveals the forces behind the disturbance in the 'metabolic interaction' between humanity and nature. Arguing for regulating this interchange in a 'rational way,' Marx shows what is required for the restoration of healthy growth in the relation between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325999823_Ethics_Essence_and_Immanence_Marx's_Normative_Essentialism
Volume Two of Marx’s Socialism from Within
I develop Marx's socialism in terms of a concept of rational freedom. This concept holds that the freedom of each individual is conditional upon and co-existent with the freedom of all individuals. In turn I ground this concept in Marx's normative essentialist anthropology, arguing that Marx espouses an ethics of immanence in which human nature and the realization of healthy potentials for flourishing form the basis of socialism. I show that Marx's argument is infused with essentialist categories.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326000024_A_Home_and_a_Resting_Place_Homo_Religiosus_The_Reality_of_Religious_Truth_and_Experience
Volume Three of Marx’s Socialism from Within
Here I consider Marx’s relation to religion, arguing that Marx requires the existence of transcendent norms, truths and values in order to make good his emancipatory claims, checking dangers of a ‘men as gods’ delusion that engulfs the world in a universal hatred. I examine ethics in light of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ to show the need for a totalising political ethics. I end with a substantial chapter on the virtuous communities of Alasdair MacIntyre, arguing that these need to be scaled up to achieve the large scale social embodiment of the good.
In this book I argue for a concept of ecological virtue as a condition for constituting a flourishing earthly commonwealth. I establish the virtues as qualities for successful living within specific social relations, putting character formation and social formation together to deliver a common control of collective forces that is based upon personal (co)responsibility. In conceiving these qualities along ecological lines, then ‘successful living’ takes shape as sustainable living in the ecological society. At this point it becomes possible to call back the old eudaimonistic notion of flourishing well. The book therefore needs to be set against the background of Owen Flanagan’s book The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (2007), where Flanagan writes of ‘eudaimonistic scientia’, or ‘eudaimonics’ for short, which he defines as the ‘empirical-normative inquiry into the nature, causes, and conditions of human flourishing.’ Establishing these conditions in terms of the institutions, structures, practices and relations in which human and planetary flourishing go hand in hand, I seek to recover the ancient unity of ethics and politics in an ecological context, thereby outlining the contours of the Ecopolis of the future.
Plenty of the arguments in Being at One comes from MacIntyre and Nussbaum in philosophy, Flannery in ecology, Wilson in biology, Robert Wright on the non-zero sum society, (The nonzero-sum moment - our welfare is crucially correlated with the welfare of the other etc.), Stuart Kauffman on the self-organising creative universe, and many more. The originality of this thesis lies in the way these sources are brought together in an integral framework concerning the dialectic of natural dependency, moral independence and social and ecological interdependence.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325999952_BEING_AT_ONE_MAKING_A_HOME_IN_EARTH'S_COMMONWEALTH_OF_VIRTUE
Some comments on Upon Leaving Academia.edu by Guy Geltner
I have noticed a marked change in the way that Academia operates for a long while now. Of course, having thrived over the years, receiving an exposure for and interest in my work that I had not received anywhere else, I was inclined to see it as a blip before normal service, the old service, was resumed. The service, of course, has changed, and changed the relations and dynamics. Start communist, induce people to share, create a community and an interest, and then commercialise and monetize it, ration it all out and give it all back at a price. We are now expected to pay for something that is in effect our own creative power and product. A business model, of course. There’s no point in protests and grand gestures and dramatic exists. It worked well for me for a while, massively boosting my profile from being a scholar read by half a dozen academics to someone receiving interest from academics, students and institutions the world over. And I knew that the business counter-punch was going to be thrown sooner or later. Ride the tiger for as long as you can, so long as you remember that the day will come when it will devour you.
The tens of thousands of scholars and academics from all over the world don’t cease to exist, they simply take the energy, expertise and engagement elsewhere, as indeed I will, and do.
I’m not sure that I will close my user account on Academia.edu. I’ve got used to seeing my page and the long list of texts that have generated interest over the years. It’s not exactly vanity on my part but a certain reassurance, looking at the big numbers next to the texts, telling me all that hard work alone for hours, days, weeks, months, years on end, has been worthwhile, that people out there have read my words and appreciated my arguments. There are other places, of course, but I enjoyed Academia for the reason it was so simple. I could see so clearly which works were having the most impact, and I appreciated the easy to use messaging service.
My story is that in 2011 I abandoned any hopes of beginning an academic career. I had gone from working with the family building business to studying philosophy, earning a PhD after years of struggle and sacrifice in 2001. I asked my Director of Studies what exactly do you do with a PhD in philosophy, and he had a little chuckle in response. Philosophy is not actually for anything, it is just something you do because you are interested. I can’t, in all honesty, claim that I ever had much of a drive to become an academic. Even in research I had to be dragged into the proper citation of sources – ‘namedropping’ I called it, causing my DoS a near fit, seeing as the academic research committee were on his back to ensure I delivered an academically respectable piece. The war of the footnotes, where scholars hid their real thinking, a bureaucratisation that killed independent thought, and constrained thinking within the straightjacket of what everyone else was thinking. But I managed to negotiate the protocol, and produced a substantial piece of work. ‘There is no one working on Marx the same way,’ my DoS told me, pausing, thinking, then adding, ‘no, no-one, I can’t think of anyone.’ Which I took to be praise indeed in a field as well-worn as Marx. I certainly never fell for the ‘post-’ everything nonsense, and was emphatic in reclaiming truth, community, authority, ethics and politics, essences against libertarian notions of freedom. It’s just that it proved difficult to get any kind of an audience. I did find it interesting, though, that Terry Eagleton returned to Manchester just as I finished there. Two years later, Terry published After Theory (2003), a book which went big on the themes of ‘rational freedom’ that I had developed in my thesis, stressing the connection between Marx and Aristotle, essentialism and flourishing, emphasising the normative dimension of Marx’s emancipatory project, precisely as I had done.
But other than a handful of academics, and any scholars prepared to consult the university library, my work was unread. I had a place on the MA Learning and Teaching at Liverpool Hope University. This would have been my professional route into Higher Education, to begin a career as a lecturer. I needed at least six hours of teaching a week in order to be accepted onto the course, and so tried everything and everyone I knew to get in. I was offered voluntary hours at universities miles away from where I lived, the University of Central Lancashire, for instance. It would have taken two train journeys and hours of exhausting travel to get there, to work for nothing, and return home. And this, I thought, was my reward for abandoning prospects of a fairly lucrative building career, spending years in brain-breakingly hard and solitary work in philosophy and research! This was the end for me. I gave up ambitions to become a lecturer and an academic, let it be known that I couldn’t take the place on the teaching course at Liverpool Hope, and decided to draw a line under years and years of seemingly wasted effort. I discovered Academia.edu and decided to just publish all my work as a way of dispensing with it, washing my hands of all of it and walking away. That would have been 2011 or 2012. My timing was right, it seemed. Imagine my surprise when people started to contact me, praising my work, asking me questions about it. And it was a good feeling to see the figures demonstrating an interest. I made it to top 5%, then top 1%, and then spent an eternity at “Top 0.1%” I have a screen shot image of it somewhere. I took it as proof, knowing that the day would come when things would change. That day is here. I’ve been happy to share ideas and research, happy to make contact with some fantastic and keen scholars offering new angles on my own work. But now the good memories of how well the site has served me, along with the benefits of continuing to share work, are not enough to sustain interest. I’ll keep my page as a ruined edifice, suspecting that the day may well come when the company will send in the bulldozers and demolish it.
I have my own personal website, where I talk to myself at length. And there are other institutional websites I need to explore. In truth, I have grown tired of a world of inflated discourse and infinite words, a world where everybody seems to be talking and nobody listening. It’s like we are engaged in a running commentary on the end of the world that is sure to come, because everyone is talking and not enough people are doing. One of the very many reasons I am hacked off about campaigning on social media is the number of people over the years who, talking endlessly about the problems afflicting the world, ignore everything I have to say on ethics, character formation, social formation, community architecture, political architectonics, capacity building etc. etc. to ask me what my strategy is … Anyone believing that a strategy will suffice to get us out of this mess is still thinking and acting in terms of the mindset that got us into this mess. They want a rescue squad, an environmental vanguard, engineering change from without. I’ll state my case simply – external reasons and actions can only work on the basis of the prior formation of internal reasons and motivations. I put character formation and social formation together so that any extrinsic educational purpose is working with real incentives and motives. Personal moral effort matters every bit as much as social systemic organisation. Lose one or the other and you have only a half-truth in a situation when nothing less than the whole truth will suffice.
I’m examining options. I’m more inclined to dig in in my own community now, emphasise virtuous communities of practice, knit community relations together and create social proximity and network from there, create a habitus which nurturers and shares and exercises the virtues. In other words, instead of a change engineered from without in accordance with extrinsic reason, develop a self-education from within so that communities become as self-governing as far as possible.
My change in attitude reflects my growing awareness of the limitations of informing heads in the absence of prior forming of characters. I am loathe to join the world of the endless and empty circulation of words. We need communities of character, practice and virtue in the first instance.
I am examining opportunities for publicly funded research. Academia.edu was founded on a business model, so change in the direction it has taken was always o the agenda. I saw it coming, and so it came. They offered a space for us to offer our work, and we were happy to take up the offer. It has hugely benefitted me, I have to say. I had no profile at all in 2011. A few scholars whom I knew personally knew of my work. I’m not clubbable, I don’t follow schools and party lines. I refuse to write for various platforms and forums, not because I am precious about my work, but because I know I will be taking positions that will contradict a particular line. I need to write freely, and not be concerned to ensure what I am writing fits a position or a perspective. That’s the reason I have refused many opportunities to write for other organisations and institutions – I don’t think my work will cut the required standards and I’d rather not be involved in the efforts to make it fit. My energies dissipate quickly with protocol and politics.
Academia’s concern to profit from the service it established is good business. We could complain about the way it created and/or satisfied a need, only to exploit that need commercially in the long run. Good business sense, create the need and satisfy it – as I was taught in my St Helens Chamber of Commerce business classes.
Also worthy of comment is the metrics and rankings which accompany the activities on the site. My numbers were so high that, of course, I enjoyed the feature! I’ll defend myself here by pointing out that from 1990 to 2001 I spent a long, long period in a research isolation that was not splendid but which was intensely inhuman. It felt good to know that you were still alive and that people actually knew you existed and that the work you have done actually mattered. That said, the emphasis on numbers and rankings encourage the fetish for the quantitative which is characteristic of the business management model and reveals everything about what is going wrong in the world today. The temper of politics is judicious, argued Aristotle. It’s just that, in a world of fact divorced from value, people are losing the capacity to evaluate. They need a table of figures, targets and rankings before they will act. The effect is ruinous.
In terms of my own participation on Academia, ignoring the intentions built into the business model, I was involved in the democratisation of knowledge in its generation and sharing. That remains my commitment. Academia.edu, like much else in the academic world, is moving into a commercial, restrictive, less democratic direction, reproducing the dollar-for-dollar relation of the cash nexus dominating capitalist society. But we knew that that is bound to happen, unless we innovate alternative modes of organisation.
“Share your research” is the idealistic invitation from Academia.edu, and many have taken it. That motto is now underwritten by the realistic caveat: “If you can afford to.” For a long time now, I have been asked to pay for features I took for granted, and pay for figures that boost my academic ego, is not reputation. It’s the old question: ‘how much does it cost if it is free?’
So we always knew that this day would come. I now feel somewhat awkward at being complicit in promoting the activities of a site that is part of the growing problem of inequality in academia and education, not a part of the solution to it. So I need to look elsewhere to other institutions involved in providing free access to and dissemination of research, creating the alternative we demand by our own efforts.
My publications will continue to be accessible on Academia.edu, as well as on Research Gate and Mendeley. I am looking at other options. I think I may as well form that e-publishing company that was my original intention. I have to say I am loathe to put a price on ideas and words. I have managed not to do so so far. I’m quite proud of the fact that I have offered my work for free, not merely sharing research, but generating ideas that may be of practical benefit in the metaphysical reconstruction required in order to put people and planet on an even keel. There are other approaches. I tend not to comment on this, I don’t need the aggravation, but I find the industry in end of the world doomsterism distasteful. The world is ending, here’s how to cope with grief and loss, buy my new book. The world is ever ending, it’s a career for life and a nice pension plan. I loathe it. And I loathe the vanity, the promotion of names. I find it indulgent, decadent and insipid, an expression of the age of ‘convulsive self-importance’ that Weber wrote of. And it has always worried me that I have joined in the cacophony of meaningless noise. In my defence, I only joined Academia.edu in 2011-12 out of a decision to abandon ambitions for an academic career, and things exploded from there. Before that, few people knew I was around, and I could happily return to that anonymity. There are much better ways of making one’s peace with the world, expressing humility through true worship in service to something greater than the ego. But who will know? God will know. And that’s a good public to have.
I need to check this site out:
http://www.uva.nl/over-deuva/organisatie/medewerkers/content/g/e/g.geltner/g.geltner.html.
People are always welcome to contact me directly on my own website to discuss my work, or for any of my publications they are struggling to access.
It seems that many users have been unsuspecting of Academia’edu’s commercial designs. It’s a clever strategy, appeal to the idealism of sharing knowledge and being part of a research community, appeal to ego and vanity at the same time, clouding the line between an awareness of one’s worth and one’s self-importance, hook people on numbers and then monetize the commons that has been generated. There are implications for professional academics, copyright and the freedom of scholarship. I’m not a professional academic and see knowledge, like the world we share – or ought to share – in common as public. It’s all out there. I see myself as a custodian of the books. I read from them, learn from them, add to them, pass them on. That’s not a business model, of course. And there’s no point expecting an apple to be a pear and vice versa.
I have made no decision as to whether to close my Academia.edu account. The company itself has clearly decided to close me down. I have made it crystal clear that they will not get a cent out of me. So I will fade away like an old ruin awaiting demolition day. I need an alternate platform. Or maybe move wholesale into e-publishing with my own company, which was always the idea. I’d still prefer the great public, mind.
Academia.edu has worked well for me as an independent scholar, putting me in touch with undergraduate and graduate students, professional academics, independent researchers, teachers, various institutions, projects, etc. I was contacted by someone at Harvard Divinity School through Academia.edu, who asked whether I would be interested in contributing a paper to some seminar or other, and so away I went and produced an entire book on St. Thomas Aquinas, enough material for several seminars. It’s been interesting. I’ve found it better than the site’s main for-profit competitors, ResearchGate, Mendeley, and SSRN, whose main focus so far has been on medical and social sciences. I’m on those sites, but have found interest far greater on Academia.edu, which has 36 million members. In comparison, ResearchGate has 8 million members, Mendeley 2.5 million, and SSRN 1.7 million.
Talking of ego and vanity, I can’t resist pointing out again that I held a “Top 0.1%” ranking among Academia’s 36 million members for a few years. Not bad at all for an independent scholar with only the force of ideas and a keen heart behind him. I’m self-driven and self-funded, and I’m actually quite proud of my little contribution to the republic of letters. I have made my work available for free. I don’t like the idea of pay walls denying access to people who want to read me. If they contact me directly on my own website I will be happy to oblige, no charge. Like the desire to know, knowledge ought to be common to all – accessibility is key. That’s my public and emancipatory commitment.
I was happy to be a part of Academia.edu. Now, with the charging of money for new services, even for services formerly provided for free, I am now complicit in practices of which I do not approve. If accessing the site will cost money, then I will not be happy to have my work exploited as product. My commitment is to public knowledge in a public world, participating in a not-for-profit learned community of scholars. But apparently that is utopian, not so much uneconomic as non-economic, proposing ‘freemium’ accounts that exist in no viable economic system. If you want a way out of the predicament, may I suggest no halfway house ever works. It’s my main rule of thumb in politics, where things go from bad to worse on account of contending political ideologies unable to settle on one clear and coherent way forward, compromising on some half-assed ‘solution’ that makes bad problems worse and costs a lot of money and causes a lot of damage in the process. It’s called liberalism. If we have to charge, then charge a flat fee, rather than irritate the life out of users with little fees for everything, creating fears of more fees forever to come. I refuse to enter that invitation to an escalating monetization. But what if even half of the 36 million users were prepared to pay a flat fee? How much? $50? $25? $10? $5? It could be done. Of course, with a business model, we enter the world of charging. Fees will keep going up until we face the same problems. I would have thought Academia’s main priority would be to keep those 36 million users. One of my research interests is the city and the urban environment. Lewis Mumford, an expert on cities, emphasized that with respect to the city the contents are more important than the container. The greatest asset or resource any institution or organisation can have is the people. There is no profit without people.
Academia.edu has moved in other directions, too, with peer-review capacity, both pre- and post-publication, and an elaborate system to rank contributions and contributors, reviewers and commentators that for the life of me I have never been able to understand. I have a rank on Recommendations, Author Rank, and Paper Rank, and I think it may be very high. Except that there is a distinct possibility that I may have misunderstood the system and may in fact be ranked very low. I’ve never been interested enough to work it out. I have a number, and it means whatever I want it to mean.
Given its simple interface and 36 million users, Academia.edu has huge potential for publishing original research. That’s why I was happy to be a part of the site from just after its launch. I’m glad to have played a little part in its expansion. I grew as it grew.
I have a particular loathing for the bureaucrats of knowledge, the people who dot the i’s and cross the t’s, who engage in the war of the footnotes, existing as toadstools on the original work of others and acting as gatekeepers to the world of knowledge, never having the nerve let alone the nous to think out of turn. There is a place for scholarship, of course, so that people are not allowed to get away with saying whatever they like. But I look at the great books that have changed history – Aristotle, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, try Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and see how it digresses and wanders off on tangents, the bulk of Marx, and ask how many of them would be published today. I’m glad to be on the outside, I’d suffocate inside that straightjacket. There is a staunch and blinkered bias against online, open-access journals on the part of the academy, and it is a patent attempt at professional self-protection. Just remember, these were the people who turned Aristotle into a sterile authority standing in the way of science and intellectual progress. I’ve been pleased to know people who abandoned the academy out of disgust at the way academicization sterilizes thought. I did it myself. Hilariously, the people who some scholars study so meticulously with neurotic obsessive accuracy were actually volcanic explosion of thought and risk taking, trail blazers driven by a passion. Of course, we only remember the few greats, the ones who got it right, and forget the very many more whose efforts were wasted because they were plain wrong. Just saying you may have to bark up a few trees in life...
Academia.edu, of course, faces the problem of the heavy costs of maintaining the site. The reason I use them rather than set up my own site is precisely to do with those costs. Those costs will increase if it starts to publish research, involving it in editing, peer reviewing, copy editing, indexing, and archiving. It all costs money, and someone has to pay.
The near future may well bring fresh experiments, however. The venture capitalists behind Academia.edu, like those backing ResearchGate, did not invest in a charity. (Mendeley is now owned by the publicly traded Elsevier and SSRN is produced by a privately held corporation; incidentally, its advisory board appears to be all male). As such, they are steering it towards an Initial Public Offering or IPO, as I was told in no uncertain terms by Price. Their working and very plausible assumption is that an enterprise needs to be profitable or show much promise of profit, for its IPO to be an attractive option, and they are presumably pressuring Price and his team to prepare the ground for it before a new round of fundraising. I speculate that under these circumstances, new publishing-related services offered by the site will likely begin to cost money, especially in the form of Article Processing Charges or APCs. An APC is a fee that many (but by no means all) academic publishers collect to help meet the costs of the services mentioned above (copy editing, archiving, marketing, etc.). Publishers sometimes charge additional fees to make articles freely accessible online, offsetting a projected loss of income from subscriptions and ad hoc purchases. Debates on how to calculate an APC (especially the second kind) are ongoing, and estimations vary, from a low of several hundred dollars in the humanities to a high of around $5,000, mostly in the natural sciences.
Higher education cannot be expected to heal all the injustices it inherits, yet it should try to avoid exacerbating them. During the discussion of my post, for instance, many raised concerns about what the failure of sites such as Academia.edu could bring to the millions of scholars who are not (or no longer, or not yet) professional academics, especially those without private means to access expensive (and usually privately owned) databases and libraries. That is an important point. Academia.edu certainly cannot be held responsible for these people’s predicament. Indeed, the latter is mainly the fault of populist governments, funders’ desire to show quick results, academic institutions’ and scholars’ obsession with prestige, and greedy publishing conglomerates fighting tooth and nail to secure their huge profit streams. But changing this state of affairs will not follow from supporting yet another portal transitioning into a “pay-to-play” academic publisher, and whose planned IPO is unlikely to stimulate scholarly diversity and autonomy. To repeat, Academia.edu is hardly unique in wanting to grow and bite a large chunk of the APC pie, but since it will likely exacerbate unequal access to academic publishing in the process, those without institutional backing or independent means will suffer more, not less, from its envisaged new direction.
Towards a promised land of Open Access publishing for the Humanities? (Hortus Deliciarum, by Herrad von Landsberg . Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons).
What is to be done?
There is no solution that fits the needs of all those millions who currently use for-profit portals like Academia.edu. If the lively discussion we had last week drove any point home, it is that the site’s membership is enormously diverse and serves different people in very different ways. So people will have to make choices: ‘At the organization level, Academia.edu itself can undergo a reorientation, either becoming (as I suggested above) a not-for-profit learned society or get bought or underwritten by a consortium of non-profits, including universities, research centers, and ad-hoc collaborations.’
Whatever your choice on the matter, it would mean overcoming or reorienting the path of least resistance paved by Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley, SSRN and their likes. Scholarly activism would be a welcome change to the laziness that has characterized our modus operandi on this front. It may be unpleasant news, but Academia.edu’s success is based on our woeful tendency to search for information (including scholarly articles) on Google, and almost nowhere else; a tragic irony given that our role in society is to find an independent voice, not blindly sail down the stream.
Incredibly good point. Most people know me only by my electronic identity. Whatever they think of the books I have written, these themselves are expressions of a deeper personal history rooted in books and their reading. I have only been on the Internet since 2011, the knowledge and understanding I have acquired has been the product of reading real books in the raw, not googling. I would always insist on reality as against inflation and escalation. And those books are my own, searched for in miscellaneous book shops, old books, rare books, second hand books. I searched the shelves, picked up whatever books were available, examined their contents, was inspired by new ideas and fresh directions. Shoe leather is what counts. I’m thinking of a phrase that Russian poet Osip Mandelstam used to describe Dante’s search for knowledge and wisdom as as hard and physical as it was intellectual and ethical (Osip Mandelstam, Conversation About Dante).
With every intervention or publicly funded article we give to those who will eventually trade it (or leverage it to turn a profit), we are contributing to the subordination of science to the whims of financial or political elites. The recent sale of Ashgate Publishing to Informa, the parent company of Taylor & Francis, is only the most recent case in point. (I do accept that university presses can be an exception to this rule, at least in the sense that they are meant to support their institutions, and by extension underwrite independent research). It is time to stop being naïve, and do something for the freedom of scholarship. Open access to scholarship should be a human right, not a business model.
Dante is where I'm going next, regardless of academic ambitions (which are zero). You'd better get moving if you want to meet me in Paradise.