Paper short abstract:

As start-up tech companies reimagine components of the scholarly communication system, are observers too quick to assimilate the new into the known? This presentation will discuss the analogical extensions used to understand Academia.edu, the social-network and document-sharing platform.

Paper long abstract:

As start-up companies reimagine components of the scholarly communication system, are observers too quick to assimilate the new into the known? This presentation will discuss the case of Academia.edu, a social-network and document-sharing platform and the debates it has stirred. Launched in 2008, the platform boasts over thirty-million users and ten-million documents, and has raised 17.7 million dollars in venture-capital. While the company has succeeded in attracting the largest user base among academic social-network platforms, it has also attracted controversy over its platform design and business model.

Academia.edu has been subsumed into discussions about scholarly communication through two analogical extensions. Many librarians see the platform as a digital-document repository for grey literature, akin to subject and institutional repositories that are core infrastructure for green open-access. This perspective leads to evaluations of whether Academia.edu fulfills the functions of a repository. Radical open-access advocates see Academia.edu as a data-mining information intermediary, akin to social-media or search-engine companies. This equivalence folds Academia.edu into critiques of neoliberalism and the commoditization of science.

Even as these analogical extensions provide the critical purchase of established analytical frameworks, they hinder the recognition of shifts in a sociotechnical assemblage. The social-network architecture of Academia.edu's platform enables discovery mechanisms that differ from those based on the knowledge-organization schemes used by libraries. And the company has yet to settle on a business model, looking at job advertisements and author-pays gold open-access publishing as possible sources of revenue. What forms of analysis will enable a better appreciation of still emergent system?