Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.

  1. Fool's avatar
  2. Santa Monica's avatar
  3. Charles Bakker's avatar
  4. Matty Silverstein's avatar
  5. Jason's avatar
  6. Nathan Meyvis's avatar
  7. Stefan Sciaraffa's avatar

    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Trouble with academia.edu (UPDATED)

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCTOBER 1, SEE BELOW

Philosopher Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) writes:

Some users of academia.edu are presently having severe problems editing their academia.edu webpages.  These problems are ongoing and academia.edu are not providing timely or helpful responses.  For others having such problems I suggest not trying to work with academia.edu at least until the problems are solved, otherwise one risks both frustration and substantial and pointless loss of time.

UPDATE (9/30):  Richard Price, founder and CEO of academia.edu, asked me to share this message he sent to Ken Gemes:

Dear Ken, thank you for raising this. The edit bug is affecting a small percentage of users. It's dependent on a particular configuration of browser and operating system, and our engineers haven't yet been able to identify the problematic configuration, and reproduce the bug. We are arranging skype calls today with users to watch the bug appearing. That should help us figure out what's going on, and fix the issue. We realize this is frustrating. We apologize for the inconvenience while we get to the bottom of this.

Richard Price, 

Founder, Academia.edu"

ANOTHER (10/1):  Huw Price (Cambridge) asked me to share the following message he sent to Richard Price:

Thank you for responding to Ken's complaint. Another thing that many of us dislike about academia.edu, as I suspect you must be aware, is that downloading is hidden behind a login wall. Could you fix that, too, perhaps, while you are in problem-solving mode?

I'll open this for any additional comments/suggestions about academia.edu.

OCTOBER 5 UPDATE:  Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) writes that the site has "successfully addressed the technical problems that were previously affecting some users."

Leave a Reply to graduate Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

4 responses to “Trouble with academia.edu (UPDATED)”

  1. graduate

    It's fairly easy to tell that the site's programming is flawed. For instance, whenever I click a link before the page has finished downloading, I get an "oops, something went wrong" message on the current page. It does not take a genius programmer to fix that. Also, the notifications function was working so poorly that I just turned it off. For instance, I would get multiple emails from the same visit. Today, for the first time ever, I looked up how to create a google site. I plan on deactivating my academia.edu page when I'm satisfied with my google site.

    Reply
  2. Justin Caouette

    Dear Richard (and all at Academia.edu): Yes, there are flaws, work on giving us the best product, I suppose. But thank you for providing a platform (free of charge) for me to share my work. Keep up the great work!

    Sincerely,

    A satisfied Academia.edu user

    Reply
  3. Aaron Garrett

    I want to strongly second Justin. Academia.edu has been a wonderful way for me to access all sorts of stuff that I never would see otherwise, to have my drafts and papers read by and get comments from a wide range of academics, and to engage on many fronts. It does a lot of things that personal paper websites do not. If you want a website only so that readers can access your papers in a targeted manner — i.e. they read your CV and then they look at your website — a personal website may do that job better. But if you want to access work from a wide range of disciplines and have a wide range of disciplines access your work, and to see stuff outside your sub discipline it's really great. It's a marvelous check against philosophical insularity, which needs to be continually checked. It's not all about people reading your work (well maybe it is for some of you). It's about you reading authors and work you might not otherwise in disciplines you don't regularly access.

    Reply
  4. Christian List

    One problem with Academia.edu, in my view, is the following clause in its Terms of Use (as of February 24, 2015, at https://www.academia.edu/terms):

    "By making any Member Content available through the Site or Services, you hereby grant to Academia.edu a worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, sublicenseable, perpetual, royalty-free license to reproduce, modify for formatting purposes, prepare derivative works based upon, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute, and otherwise use your Member Content in connection with operating and providing the Services and Content to you and to other Members."

    Though I'm not lawyer, I worry that the licence that members thereby grant to Academia.edu is far too strong. For example, what exactly does "perpetual" mean? Does it mean that Academia.edu retains this right even if someone removes an uploaded paper from his/her profile, or even if someone deletes his/her profile altogether? And what about "sublicenseable"? Furthermore, while most journals now have green open access policies which allow authors to post preprints of their published articles on non-commercial websites, it is not clear to me whether the Academia.edu terms (worded in the strong way I have quoted) are — strictly speaking — compatible with those green open access policies. (By contrast, posting articles on a non-commercial university server is unproblematically compatible with those policies.) Of course, right now, all parties involved seem to tolerate the status quo, but it would be good to modify the Terms of Use in such a way as to avoid these potential legal concerns.

    By the way, it seems to me that both SSRN and ResearchGate have somewhat less demanding Terms of Use, though even in the case of those sites it would be interesting to know how their Terms of Use fit with journals' green open access policies.

    Needless to say, I, too, applaud the spirit of the open access movement and think that academic social networking sites provide a useful service. My remarks are meant to be constructive.

    BL COMMENT: I agree with Prof. List that the license is too open-ended and it would seem to cover work removed from academia.edu.

    —–
    KEYWORDS:
    Primary Blog

    Reply

Designed with WordPress