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<b>Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu?</b></p>
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Coventry University</p>
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Tuesday 8th December 2015</p>
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3:00-6:00pm</p>
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Ellen Terry Building room ET130</p>
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With:</p>
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Janneke Adema Chair (Coventry University, UK)</p>
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Pascal Aventurier (INRA, France)</p>
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Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA/Coventry University, US)</p>
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Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK)</p>
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David Parry (Saint Josephs University, US)</p>
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Organised by <i>The</i> <i>Centre for Disruptive Media</i>: <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.disruptivemedia.org/" target="_blank"
id="LPlnk774369" title="http://www.disruptivemedia.org/
Cmd+Click or tap to follow the link"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.disruptivemedia.org">www.disruptivemedia.org</a></a></p>
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Registration: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://why-are-we-not-boycotting-academia-edu.eventbrite.co.uk/"
target="_blank">http://why-are-we-not-boycotting-academia-edu.eventbrite.co.uk</a></p>
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With over 36 million visitors each month, the San
Francisco-based platform-capitalist company Academia.edu is
hugely popular with researchers. Its founder and CEO Richard
Price maintains it is the <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://fortune.com/2015/05/08/scientists-social-study/"
target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext;
text-decoration: none;">largest social-publishing network
for scientists</span></a>, and <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://fortune.com/2015/05/08/scientists-social-study/"
target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext;
text-decoration: none;">larger than all its competitors
put together</span></a>. 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.</p>
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Academia.edus 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. </p>
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To date over 15,000 researchers have taken a stand against the
publisher Elsevier by adding their name to the list on the <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://thecostofknowledge.com/"
target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext;
text-decoration: none;">Cost of Knowledge</span></a> website
demanding they change how they operate. Just recently 6
editors and 31 editorial-board members of one of Elsevier's
journals, <i>Lingua</i>, went so far as to resign, leading to
calls for a boycott and for support for <i>Glossa</i>, the
open access journal they plan to start instead. By contrast,
the business practices of Academia.edu have gone largely
uncontested. </p>
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This is all the more surprising given that when Elsevier
bought the academic social network Mendeley in 2013 (it was <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/when-the-rebel-alliance-sells-out"
target="_blank"><span style="color: windowtext;
text-decoration: none;">suggested</span></a> at the time
that Elsevier was mainly interested in acquiring Mendeleys
user data), many academics deleted their profiles out of
protest. Yet generating revenue from the exploitation of user
data is exactly the business model underlying academic social
networks such as Academia.edu.</p>
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This event will address the following questions:<br>
</p>
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<li><span style="font-size: 10pt;">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?</span><br>
</li>
<li><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Should academics refrain
from providing free labour for these publishing companies
too? </span><br>
</li>
<li><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Are there non-profit
alternatives to such commercial platforms academics should
support instead?</span><br>
</li>
<li><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Could they take inspiration
from the editors of </span><i style="font-size: 10pt;">Lingua </i><span
style="font-size: 10pt;">(now </span><i style="font-size:
10pt;">Glossa</i><span style="font-size: 10pt;">) and
start their own scholar-owned and controlled platform
cooperatives for the sharing of research?</span><br>
</li>
<li><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Or are such technologies
of the self or political technologies of individuals,
as we might call them following Michel Foucault, merely
part of a wider process by which academics are being
transformed into connected individuals who endeavour to
generate social, public and professional value by acting
as microentrepreneurs of their own selves and lives? </span></li>
</ul>
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</p>
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<b>About the speakers</b></p>
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Janneke Adema is <span style="color: rgb(52, 52, 52);"
lang="EN-US">Research Fellow in Digital Media at Coventry
University. She has published in numerous</span><span
style="color: rgb(79, 79, 79);" lang="EN-US">peer-reviewed
journals and edited books including </span><i><span
style="color: rgb(52, 52, 52);" lang="EN-US">New
Formations; New Media & Society</span></i><span
style="color: rgb(52, 52, 52);" lang="EN-US">; <i>The
International Journal of Cultural Studies</i>; <i>New
Review of Academic Librarianship</i>; <i>LOGOS: The
Journal of the World Book Community; </i>and<i> Krisis:
Journal for Contemporary Philosophy</i>. She blogs at Open
Reflections:<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.openreflections.org/" target="_blank">http://www.openreflections.org/</a></span></p>
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Pascal Aventurier <span style="color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">has
been leading the Regional Scientific Information Team at the
French National Institute for Agricultural Researchs (INRA,
France) PACA Centre since 2002. He is also co-leader of the
scientific information technology group. His focus is on
research data, linked open data, open science, knowledge
management and controlled vocabularies, as well as
researching digital and social tool practices. His team is
also exploring the evolution of social networks for academic
use. His recent piece on Academic social networks:
challenges and opportunities</span>, is available here<span
style="color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.unica-network.eu/sites/default/files/Academic_Social_Networks_Challenges_opportunities.pdf"
target="_blank">http://www.unica-network.eu/sites/default/files/Academic_Social_Networks_Challenges_opportunities.pdf</a></span></p>
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Kathleen Fitzpatrick is <span style="color: rgb(52, 52, 52);"
lang="EN-US">Director of Scholarly Communication at the MLA,
and visiting professor at Coventry University. The author
of </span><span style="color: blue;" lang="EN-US"><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814727883/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=plannedobsole-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0814727883"
target="_blank"><i>Planned Obsolescence</i></a></span><span
style="color: rgb(52, 52, 52);" lang="EN-US"> (2011) she is
also co-founder of the digital scholarly network</span><span
style="color: blue;" lang="EN-US"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/"
target="_blank">MediaCommons</a></span>. Her recent piece
on Academia.edu, Academia. Not Edu, is available here:<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/academia-not-edu/"
target="_blank"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/academia-not-edu/">http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/academia-not-edu/</a></a>.</p>
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Gary Hall is <span style="color: rgb(79, 79, 79);"
lang="EN-US">Professor of </span><span style="color: rgb(92,
92, 92);" lang="EN-US">Media and Performing Arts, </span>Coventry
University, UK, and co-founder of Open Humanities Press. His <span
style="color: rgb(79, 79, 79);" lang="EN-US">new monograph, </span><i><span
lang="EN-US">Pirate Philosophy</span></i><span
style="color: rgb(79, 79, 79);" lang="EN-US">, is
forthcoming from MIT Press in early 2016. </span>His recent
piece on Academia.edu, <span lang="EN-US">What Does
Academia.edus Success Mean for Open Access?,</span><span
style="color: rgb(214, 0, 9);" lang="EN-US"> </span>is
available here: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/10/22/does-academia-edu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant/"
target="_blank"
title="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/10/22/does-academia-edu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant/
Cmd+Click
or tap to follow the link">http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/10/22/does-academia-edu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant/</a></p>
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</p>
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<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">David Parry joined Saint
Joseph's University in the Fall of 2013. His work focuses on
understanding the complex social and cultural
transformations brought about by the development of the
digital network. He is particularly interested in
understanding how the internet transforms political power
and democracy. He also researches and is an advocate for
Open Access Research. His work can be found at </span><span
style="color: blue;"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.outsidethetext.com/" target="_blank"><span
style="text-decoration: none;">www.outsidethetext.com</span></a>.</span></p>
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