Academia ou not academia ?

Academia, Not Edu
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication, Modern Language Association.
Author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (source F. Clavert)
http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/academia-not-edu/

Une double attente des chercheurs (en SHS)
- publier et faire connaître ses travaux. d’où capacité de stockage nécessaire, et maîtrise des conditions de diffusion (cf. thèse en ligne)
- échanger avec des chercheurs qui travaillent dans le même domaine, ou des domaines voisins.

extraits :
« Scholarly societies have the potential to inhabit the ideal point of overlap between a primary orientation toward serving the needs of members and a primary focus on facilitating communication amongst those members. This is in large part why we established MLA Commons, to build a not-for-profit social network governed and developed by its members »

« We’re also building mechanisms through which CORE can communicate with institutional repositories so that the entire higher-education-based research network can benefit ».
« Like all such networks, however, the Commons will take time to grow » 

« Academia.edu is not an educationally-affiliated organization, but a dot-com, which has raised millions in multiple rounds of venture capital funding. This does not imply anything necessarily negative about the network’s model or intent, but it does make clear that there are a limited number of options for the network’s future: at some point, it will be required to turn a profit, or it will be sold for parts, or it will shut down ».

« I’ve heard many careful, thoughtful academics note that they’re sharing their work there because that’s where everybody is ».

« Academia.edu has a parasitical relationship to the public education system, in that these academics are labouring for it for free to help build its privately-owned for-profit platform by providing the aggregated input, data and attention value.” The network, in other words, does not have as its primary goal helping academics communicate with one another, but is rather working to monetize that communication. All of which is to say: everything that’s wrong with Facebook is wrong with Academia.edu, at least just up under the surface, and so perhaps we should think twice before commiting our professional lives to it ».


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