I wasn’t entirely sure where to begin with Thing 20 which asked us to:
Choose one of either LinkedIn, Academia.edu, or ResearchGate and have a look at their websites as a potential user.Reflect in your blog on the merit, or not, of professional social networking platforms for you at this stage in your education/career. Have you used any of these site before? Could any of them be beneficial for your professional development?
I have never used any of these site before, and I’m pretty sure that two of them will not be of much use to me given that I don’t produce academic research. I’ve heard of LinkedIn, but never thought of it being much use to me at this point in my life. The other two sites, Academia.edu and ResearchGate were new to me and I was intrigued with the premises behind them. Scouting round their About pages I learned that
ResearchGate is built by scientists, for scientists.
It started when two researchers discovered first-hand that collaborating with a friend or colleague on the other side of the world was no easy task.
Founded in 2008 by physicians Dr. Ijad Madisch and Dr. Sören Hofmayer, and computer scientist Horst Fickenscher, ResearchGate today has more than 11+ million members. We strive to help them make progress happen faster.
Our mission
Our mission is to connect the world of science and make research open to all.
and that
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company’s mission is to accelerate the world’s research.
Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow. 45,800,149 academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding 16,719,010 papers and 1,970,561 research interests. Academia.edu attracts over 36 million unique visitors a month.
These last two intrigued me a bit, so I plumped to investigate Academia.edu a bit more. I signed up for the site, though before I did I had a quick look at its terms – one of the things that was troubling me about this site, and ResearchGate, was how do you share papers which are under copyright? Academia.edu’s general prohibitions include the following statement:
You agree not to do any of the following:
Post, upload, publish, submit or transmit any Content that: (i) infringes, misappropriates or violates a third party’s patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, moral rights or other intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy;
How on earth does the site actually work then, given that published academic papers are under some form of copyright not usually owned by the author(s) of the paper?? What exactly are academics sharing on this site given that Academia.edu is claiming 16 million plus papers have been added by its users??
Once into the site, you are prompted to upload papers or add a biography which I bypassed at this stage. I searched for University of Edinburgh and found lots of people and content and found that one of my questions was immediately answered – some of the papers are unpublished works, bits of large works e.g. theses, report type material that may never be published via traditional academic publishing means and bits of as yet unpublished works i.e. non-copyrighted work or work that the author still holds the copyright in.
I also decided to see if some of the works discover-able in Academia.edu was discover-able outside of it – lo and beheld it can be, at least some of it can, which leads on to the question just what is the unique selling point of Academia.edu is?? Is it the sahring aspect or is it the social aspect?? I can’t help feeling that well intended though Academia.edu and its ilk are they just add a layer of complication to the finding of academic research.
ParanoidAndroid 