Is Academia.edu really such a bad thing?

Academia.edu has been getting a lot of negative press in the scholarly community. I see some of this on Twitter, and I've been sent some articles and links. I just read Sarah Bond's article in Forbes, "Dear Scholars, Delete your Account at Academia.edu.:" She has three objections to Academia. I don't find any of them compelling, although one of them is troubling. First, "It is not a 'real' .edu" The domain is an old one and a commercial operation seems to be disguising itself as an educational institution. Wow, I was really fooled by that. Stupid and unsophisticated users might get confused. Give me a break, this is trivial.

Second, Academia is trying to get money for enhanced features. I guess I'm not sure how that is a bad thing. Perhaps if the basic fact that they are commercializing scholarship (my point 3) is abhorrent to you, then the enhanced features might be especially abhorrent. Again, this seems trivial to me.

Third, Academia is commercializing scholarship. They are trying to make money on the backs of scholars who do the work pretty much for free. This I see as troubling, but not a killer problem. Compare this to Elsevier and other commercial publishers. They commercialize scholarship, making money off my hard work, while inhibiting access to it. They harm my career by making money restricting access to my works. I find that practice morally abhorrent. By contrast, Academia.edu is commercializing scholarship while promoting and improving my career and professional goals. They are making my papers more widely available. I am not at all outraged by this fact, but I am somewhat disturbed by it.

What are the alternatives? I also have a page on Selected Works. I started that on a trial basis (as I did with Academia), but Academia.edu quickly turned out to be an easier process for uploading and gave my papers more readers. Selected Works does have a few features lacking at Academia (e.g., you can file a paper under more than one category). I initially posted papers on my own funky html website (now seriously out of date). Elsevier threatened my university and we got an order from an administrator to remove published papers without explicit permission to post (which I ignored). Now, the university is going to eliminate funky faculty sites and promote a more standardized (properly branded) faculty website, which I may or may not use to post my papers. My university does have an online archive, but it is not set up properly as a paper repository, and this would bury my papers even deeper than they are in my own site. I have considered posting papers there, and using links (not papers) on Academia edu. I am sure not going to start using an NEH website for important professional works, given uncertainties of the Trump presidency.

The professional society in my discipline, the Society for American Archaeology, is hopeless for help with archiving papers. I have considered using the new sociology version of ArXiv, and perhaps replacing papers on Academia.edu with links. It is called SocArXiv. It is mainly inertia that keeps me from making any changes right now.

For me, the  advancement of scholarship and promotion of wide access to my work are among my strongest professional values. Sometimes this requires me to do unpleasant things--talk to uninformed reporters, collaborate with individuals I'd rather avoid, deal with clueless journal editors, write grant proposals, go to faculty meetings. Putting up with Academia.edu trying to make money on my scholarship is just another of those unpleasant things I have to do. Yes, I would be more comfortable with a good archive, widely used and convenient, that was not a commercial enterprise. But until I find that (and have the time for a massive conversion), I will continue to put up with Academia.edu.

Journal asks me to remove a posted article pdf

I recently received  a request from a journal editor (a friend) to remove a pdf of an article of mine published in that journal from my site on Academia.edu. I complied with the request. The following text is taken from my email to the editor:

I have complied with your request to remove the pdf of my recently published paper from my Academia.edu site. I approach this issue from two—often contradictory—perspectives: moral and legal. Morally, I am complying with your request under protest. In my mind, I own my scholarly publications. I did the research, I wrote the paper, and the products are my own. I resent the policies of journals that do not permit an author to post his or her publications on the internet. These policies restrict the distribution of scientific knowledge, thereby harming the advancement of scholarship and depriving the public of knowledge obtained often with public funding. As a result, such policies also harm my career, my reputation, and the advancement of my own scholarly trajectory.

From a legal standpoint, however, I often sign the author’s agreements that prevent just this type of posting of published papers. When I am challenged about posting a paper, I typically have little basis for complaint. I signed the form, and in our society bound by the rule of law, I have to comply with the law. While my moral sentiments are quite strong on the issue, they won’t hold up in a court of law. As a citizen and public employee I feel obliged to comply with the law on this and other issues.

Open Access Week

This coming week is "Open Access Week". Check out the central website, called Open access week. The promise and importance of open access was one of the main reasons I started this blog in 2007. Over the years I think I have grown cynical about the lack of progress in open access on most fronts, but I remain committed to the concept. I was asked by librarian Anali Perry to respond to several questions about open access; my responses (and several others) will be posted on the library website this week. Here are my replies:

 

What is your experience with open access publishing?

I write about open access publishing in my blog, “Publishing Archaeology” (see URL below) and I speak out within my scholarly community (archaeology) through papers and workshops at conferences, publishing in newsletters, and such. I have posted papers in online open access “journals” (non-peer reviewed). I post most of my papers, somewhat inconsistently between my personal ASU website, Academia.edu, and the Selected Works site. I like to try out new scholarly programs and sites to see if they are useful for promoting open access and the values and benefits of OA. Academia.edu turned out to be a great site, but Researchgate turned out to be not at all useful, but with many annoying traits, so I unsubscribed. Selected Works has a very attractive interface, but seems less widely used the Academia.edu and slightly more difficult to use. I have a deep personal and professional commitment to open access (that is one reason I started my publishing blog in 2007), although I have become somewhat cynical over the lack of progress, and even signs of retrenchment or anti-progress, in the past few years.

Do you believe that open access to scholarly research is important? Why or why not?

If scholarly research is important, then open access is important. One does research in order to build knowledge that is communicated to others: colleagues and the public. Open access contributes in a strong way to the basic and fundamental goals of research and publication. Much of my research is funded by U.S. taxpayers, and they have a right to know what I have done with the funds, and to see my results. Traditional publishing in journals used to serve the goals of research/publishing very well, but today with the Internet we can promote the goals and values of research far more widely, and traditional journal publishing only serves a limited sector of our potential audience. Furthermore, commercial journals now serve to limit access to published papers by refusing to engage in open access (without a big fee).

I do research and fieldwork in Mexico. As such I work as a guest of the Mexican government and the Mexican nation. Most of the journals I publish in, however, are not available to my Mexican colleagues or the Mexican public. They are locked behind a pay wall, and people in Mexico (and most of the rest of the world) simply cannot afford the fees required to get access. When Academia.edu and Selected Works provide access statistics, my Spanish-language papers often have a higher download rate than my English-language papers. I interpret this as a function of the lack of availability of journal articles around the world. Most of my U.S. colleagues can get access to online journals through a university website, but that is not true in Mexico. Posting my papers online is the only way around this obstacle, yet that very simple and basic example of scholarly activity—making my own papers available online—is being turned into a crime.

What do you see as the biggest barrier to open access publishing options for scholars?

Let me list three barriers to open access publishing. First, the commercial publishers who lock up published papers behind a paywall are perhaps the largest barrier to open access. Modern academic research is the only realm where one works with compensation from the public and from one’s own time and resources, then gives the results for free to a large corporation, who then make profits from one’s work while preventing others from seeing it. Does this sound right? Not to me.

The second barrier to open access is apathy and ignorance by researchers. Most researchers just want to get on with their research without being bothered by setting up websites, posting papers, or dealing with the ethical and professional issues of open access.

The third barrier is universities that fail to recognize the substantial gains they could make if they embraced open access. Few universities have an institutional repository where all papers published by faculty (and students) are archived. While journals have the legal right to suppress the public posting of article pdfs, authors have the right to send pdf reprints to colleagues. The “reprint button” is a way around the barrier, by automating send sending of reprints while maintaining the lack of open posting of pdfs. How would universities (such as ASU) benefit from embracing open access, setting up a repository, and promoting other open access ideas and procedures?

First, research carried out at the university would become better known. Citations will increase (this has been shown quantitatively) and overall familiarity with university research will increase. This promotes science and scholarship and its availability to colleagues and the public. Faculty will benefit from this. Second, by boosting the research profile, it will increase the prestige of the university and its faculty. More people will see more of the activity taking place at the university. One of the basic missions of universities—creating new knowledge through research, will thus be promoted more explicitly and more intensively. Third, people outside the university will become more familiar with what the university is doing, and the university can thus have a greater impact on such people in the local region. Fourth, the global reach and engagement of the university will be improved with open access, as constituents around the world getter better access to the research findings of faculty and students. Fifth, the public display of research that is at the cutting edge of individual disciplines, and research that breaks new ground by synthesizing multiple disciplines, will benefit by finding a wider audience, which encourages communication and synergies.

In the case of ASU, these benefits of open access (and this is just a quick off-the-cuff list; there are surely more) fit with many of the principles of the New American University (http://newamericanuniversity.asu.edu/). I continue to be surprised at the lack of action on open access at this university.

What advice or recommendations about open access publishing (or scholarly publishing in general) would you give to early career researchers?

My first piece of advice would be that conducting research and publishing is more important than worrying about open access. I know of at least one colleague who put so much time into an OA project that they failed to produce sufficient scholarship to get tenure (and they were denied tenure). Everyone is grateful for this person’s professional contributions, but that person, and probably the discipline generally, would probably be better off if they had spent more time getting their own scholarship in order. That said, one rarely has to make a stark choice between basic scholarship and OA activities. I would advise early career researchers to make their publications available in one or more repositories or websites. Publish in OA journals, agitate within professional societies for OA policies and practices. Young scholars are generally highly media savvy, and they should explore the growing number of options for scholarship and scholarly communication, including OA and OA-related activities.

Resources:

My blog, Publishing Archaeology:  (http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/)

An online, open access, paper:  Smith, Michael E.  (2011)  Why Anthropology is too Narrow an Intellectual Context for Archaeology. Anthropologies 3: (online).  http://www.anthropologiesproject.org/2011/05/why-anthropology-is-too-narrow.html.

My personal website:  http://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/

My site on Academia. Edu:  https://asu.academia.edu/MichaelESmith

My site on Selected Works: http://works.bepress.com/michael_e_smith/

Commercial greed triumphs over scholarship

 

The shit is now hitting the fan in the matter of faculty posting their articles on university websites. My colleagues and I have just gotten a "takedown order" from our university. I'm not sure how I am going to handle this. I have always considered my publications page the heart of my scholarly career and the most important thing in my online presence. Pretty soon that page is going to be a mess, with posts of preprints instead of final pdfs, and links to (often locked up) journal websites. Whenever someone figures out an easy way to set up a quickie repository with a reprint button, I'll do that. In the meantime, I really hope that Academia.edu and Selected Works can withstand the pressure from the commercial publishers, and allow my pdfs to remain online at those places.

This round of scholarly regression was kicked off when Elsevier started patrolling its "property" in the form of journal articles posted on various faculty websites. Academia.edu was particularly hard hit. Elsevier hassled many universities, including Harvard, and, evidently, Arizona State University. I guess the one billion dollars in profit earned by Elsevier's journals division (yes, that is billion) was not enough for the company, and they felt they had to go after those profiteering professors who had the gall to want to distribute their research more widely.

The best recent article is:

"How one publisher is stopping academics from sharing their research" by Andrea Peterson, Washington Post, updated Dec 19, 2013.

See also:
 "The Scholarly Clampdown" by Jill Emery on ALCTS Collection=Connection. 
and:
"Elsevier is also sending takedown requests to UK universities," by Ross Mounce.

My notification came through a mass email, forward to all faculty, from an administrator. It includes this statement:


"However, this recent flurry of demands [takedown demands by Elsevier] suggests the arrival of a new season of litigiousness among publishers. To reduce both the number of such requests and the associated administrative burden of responding to request after request, would you please ask your faculty members to review their websites to ensure that no direct reproductions of copyrighted material are posted or to obtain the required permission to post those materials as needed? Again, in most cases, simply linking to the journal or publisher website will be sufficient to direct the reader to an approved means of accessing the materials and will not invoke the ire of the publisher."


I'm sorry, but simply linking to a journal website will not do the job. I have found that I get a significant number of hits and article downloads from Mexico and Latin America. My colleagues south of the border do not have subscriptions to most U.S. or European journals. They need to get the full articles, preferably in final pdf format for proper citations.

My university likes to be in the vanguard of scientific, scholarly, and professional developments. But this time, it looks more like the rearguard than the vanguard. Commercial forces are steadily eating away at universities and at scholarship. I am getting sick of providing free labor so that commercial publishers can make a bundle and then turn around and steal my own scholarly production.

So I am waiting to see what happens to Academia.edu and Selected Works; they may have to bear the burden of my pdfs for a while. When this new wave of commercial greed is coupled with the ethical questions discussed by Kansa et al (2013), the combination might be enough to tip the balance and lead me to avoid publishing in commercially-owned journals (or reviewing for them). One reason I have been hesitant to make the plunge is that most things I have been publishing lately are co-authored with students. Students need the prestige of major journals to build their careers, and I am torn between supporting OA journals and supporting my students at traditional journals. Another reason for hesitation is the lack of high-quality OA journals in my fields.

I've been meaning to discuss the Kansa et al. paper for a while, so I think that will come up here soon. And looking forward, the opening Wednesday evening sponsored symposium at the SAA meetings in Austin will be a panel discussion on "Publishing in archaeology in the 21st century". It should be an interesting event. Sarah Kansa will participate, John Yellen, a bunch of journal editors, and a few others, including me.

Kansa, Eric C., Sarah Whitcher Kansa, and Lynne Goldstein
2013    On Ethics, Sustainability, and Open Access in Archaeology. The SAA Archaeological Record 13 (4): 15-22.

I'm not quite ready to sign, but I'm getting closer......  (from The Cost of Knowledge).

The White House promotes open access to research results

I received an e-mail from the White House yesterday. No, it wasn't Michelle Obama chatting about Pac-12 Men's Basketball (her brother coaches the Oregon State team). It was from John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I had signed a "We the People" petition advocating: "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research." The petition and Holdren's reply are posted here.

Holdren has posted a memorandum requiring federal agencies that fund research (e.g., NSF, NEH, NIH) to come up with policies and procedures to make the results of that research publicly available without charge. The memorandum deals with access to journal articles as well as data archiving and the availability of basic data from federally-funded research.

This is a big step forward for open access, and I am encouraged at the twin foci of journal articles and data archiving. The Society for American Archaeology is doing various things to work toward open access for publications and data, including the upcoming launch of a new open access journal, Advances in Archaeological Practice, edited by Chris Dore.

Where are your data stored? If you died tomorrow, would your data be available to others? Are they in an online repository such as tDAR? If not, you should be working toward this goal; I am.

Open Access video

I missed Open Access Week last week, but here is a great video on OA from Jorge Cham (of PhD comix (Piled Higher and Deeper). It is a bit limited in its conception, ignoring important distinctions such as Green OA vs. Gold OA (it is only about the latter). But as a rationale for OA for scientists and scholars, it is great:

OA video, click here.



I love these illustrated/animated lectures. My favorite is David Harvey's lecture on Crises of Capitalism, part of the British series "RSA Animate"). Okay, now who is going to do the artwork for one of my lectures?

American Anthropologist editor promotes Open Access

The outoing editor of American Anthropologist, Tom Boellstorff, has published an eloquent plea for the American Anthropological Association to move toward Gold Open Access for its journals. As you will recall, gold OA is the situation where journals are posted on the internet, freely available for reading and downloading by anyone (see some of my previous posts about this).

Here are his reasons (quoted from page 389):

"There are three primary reasons why this transition to gold open access is imperative, reasons that are simultaneoulsy ethical, political, and intellectual. First, there is a fundamental contradiction between the often-repeated goal of making anthropology more public and relevant on the one hand and the lack of open access on the other hand. Second, there is an incompatibility between the broad interest in transnationalzing anthropology and the lack of open access. Third, it is wrong for any academic journal to be based on a model where the unremunerated labor of scholars supports corporate profits. I see no way that the current subscription-based model can be modified so as to adequately address these concerns."

Check out the full paper:

Boellstorff, Tom    2012    From the Editor: Why the AAA Needs Gold Open Access. American Anthropologist 114(3): 389-393.

A parable about open access to scholarly publications

Check out the nice piece in The Guardian today,
"The parable of the farmers and the teleporting duplicator" by Mike Taylor in The Guardian, Feb 10, 2012.

American Anthropological Association joins the dark side of the force

Check out Daniel Lende's post on Neuroanthopology, "American Anthropological Association takes public stand against open access." This concerns an open letter submitted by AAA Executive Director William Davis to the White House call for public comment on public access to scholarly publications. Wow, it looks like the AAA has lined up with the commercial publishers, not with scholars and researchers.

Do you recall the cartoon I published on open access a few weeks ago? Well, the AAA has now joined with commercial publishers as the tail wagging the research dog.

This development makes me glad that I resigned from the American Anthropological Association last year. It is one thing to complain about a professional association that is inefficient or clueless or off-base about some things. But the situation is really bad when the leadership goes over to the dark side of the force, making scholars ashamed of being anthropologists.

Bill in US Congress to limit Open Access

The Research Works Act, H.R. 3699, is a bill that would make it illegal for researchers to post their own publications on the internet for public access. Guess who is behind this bill? Elsevier and the commercial publishing lobby (the Association of American Publishers).

Steven Harnad's post: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again contains the most detailed and useful discussion of the issue that I've seen.

Michelle Clement's blog at Scientific American, Reseaerch Works Act would deny taxpayers access to federally funded research., starts out, "Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money."

For more information about the bill and about WHAT U.S. CITIZENS CAN DO about this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.

Free labor by academics so that commercial publishers can make a profit

This allegory is from "Time for academics to withdraw free labor", on Dorothy Bishop's BishopBlog:

Jack is a sheep farmer. He gets some government subsidies, and also works long hours to keep his sheep happy and healthy. When his beasts are ready for slaughter, he offers them to an abattoir. The abattoir is very choosy and may reject Jack’s sheep, which is a disaster for him, as there is no other route to the market. If he is lucky the abattoir will accept the animals, slaughter them and sell them, at a large profit, to the supermarket. Jack does not see any of this money. The populace struggle to afford the price of meat, but the government has no control over this. When Jack feels like a nice piece of lamb, he buys it from the supermarket. Meanwhile, Jack provides his services for free as an inspector of other farmers’ animals.

 

Crazy story, right? But that’s the model that academic publishing follows..........

See BishopBlog for more. Dorothy Bishop wants authors and reviewers to boycott Elsevier journals.


Her blog has a number of fascinating and humorous posts, including:

How to become a celebrity science expert (sarcastic)

Science Journal Editors: A Taxonomy

More on predatory journals

As a follow-up to my post on Jeffrey' Beall's list of "predatory open access journals" (see my previous post on this) (Beall's original post is here; see also here),  Open Access journalist and advocate Richard Poynder has posted an interesting interview with the founder and Managing Director of one of the target companies:

The Open Access Interviews: OMICS Publishing Group’s Srinu Babu Gedela.

Srinu Babu Gedela, or course, denies that OMICS is a predatory publisher.

Poynder suggests that the research community should accept some of the responsibility for these bogus journals. After all, thousands of researchers (including archaeologists) have agreed to serve on the editorial boards of these journals, and perhaps review articles for them.

Richard Poynder does research and journalism about Open Access. I highly recommend his blog, Open and Shut. If you want to explore Open Access in more detail, I highly recommend Poynder's extended interviews in a series called the "Basement Interviews" (follow the link on the main page). The first two interviews, at the bottom of the list, are with Steven Harnad and Peter Suber, my two heroes in the Open Access movement.

Predatory (Bogus) Open Access Journals

I just found a nice post, "Beall's list of Predatory, Open Access Journals." This is the definition given:

Predatory, open-access publishers are those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit. Typically, these publishers spam professional email lists, broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose of gaining additional income. Operating essentially as vanity presses, these publishers typically have a low article acceptance threshold, with a false-front or non-existent peer review process. Unlike professional publishing operations, whether subscription-based or ethically-sound open access, these predatory publishers add little value to scholarship, pay little attention to digital preservation, and operate using fly-by-night, unsustainable business models.

.

This definition is followed by a list of publishers, including Bentham Publishers. When their new journal, The Open Anthropology Journal, was announced in 2008, I expressed my sketicism in this blog, and then again when the first articles came out.

Here is the recommendation of Jeffrey Beall:

Recommendation: Do not do business with the above publishers, including submitting article manuscripts, serving on editorial boards, buying advertising, etc. There are numerous traditional, legitimate journals that will publish your quality work for free, including many legitimate, open-access publishers.

If you are involved in any form of scholarly evaluation such as, hiring, tenure / promotion review, or grant funding, be skeptical of articles published by any of these publishers listed above. Reading a list of publications or a vita, it is very difficult to distinguish legitimate journals from the illegitimate ones. One of the tricks the sham publishers use is to assign authentic-sounding and appearing titles to their journals. The presence of these bogus publishers has changed the task of scholarly evaluation, which now needs a keener eye to discern articles published in fraudulent journals.

Lest anyone think that "bogus" is too strong a word to use for these predatory journals, consider the apparent lack of rigorous peer review. In my classification of new journal-like venues, these would fall into the category of "pseudo-journals."