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Academia.edu: “pay to play,” or at least be recommended?

Brian Leiter

Galen Strawson (Texas) calls to my attention that he received the following e-mail from academia.edu:

From: Adnan Akil <adnan@academia.edu> Date: Wednesday, 27 January 2016 at 18:28 To: galen strawson <gstrawson@austin.utexas.edu> Subject: Certification Value

Hi Dr. Strawson,    My name is Adnan, I'm the Product Director here at Academia. I noticed you had received a few recommendations on your papers. Would you be open to paying a small fee to submit any upcoming papers to our board of editors to be considered for recommendation? You'd only be charged if your paper was recommended. If it does get recommended then you'll see the natural boost in viewership and downloads that recommended papers get. Would love to hear your thoughts. Best, Adnan

He asked me what I thought of this, and I said it sounded a bit corrupt, but Galen reached out to Richard Price, the founder of academia.edu, who shared the following explanation with Galen (and gave me permission to share it as well):

Dear Galen,

Thanks for getting in touch. Yes – this is a somewhat radical and somewhat crazy idea. It has already caused a ruckus on Twitter. We are probing at how to develop an open access publishing model with a lower fee than the average open access journal. We want to start the conversation around how to fund academic publishing when paywall revenues dry up (which I think they will over the coming years). The sciences are switching to an APC-funded model, but that model doesn't straightforwardly work for non-grant funded people in the humanities. It seems to us that either you figure out a super low cost APC for humanities publishing ($50 or so) or you have the normal APC (around $1,500), and figure out a way for universities to cover the fee. Adnan's question was probing the first idea.

Richard

Comments are open for thoughts from readers.

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17 responses to “Academia.edu: “pay to play,” or at least be recommended?”

  1. anon

    I’m guessing the whole ‘aren’t we just zany!’ schtick is pretty transparent to most readers, and gets even more tiresome the more and more it gets repeated…

    Reply
  2. Thomas Nadelhoffer

    If we assume for the sake of argument that they're being genuine about the problem they're trying to address–namely, how to make journals open-access and affordable for authors–then, I applaud their efforts (even if I think their strategy is sub-optimal). I have been thinking for a while about different models for online, open-access journals. My original plan was to host a new philosophy journal on a blog/webpage and run ads. The ad revenue would cover the costs of running the journal, etc. The whole venture could be set up as a non-profit. That seems (at least to me) to be a better approach to addressing the problem Richard raised in his response.

    Charging authors a $50 fee or asking them to donate $20–as is the case with Philosopher's Imprint–represent one method of addressing this issue. But it's not clear to me they represent the best method. Either way, it *is* a problem that does need to be addressed moving forward. So, if people (a) don't like charging authors fees (or asking for donations), and (b) want journals to be open-access, then they should join in the conversation concerning how to create a viable alternative.

    Reply
  3. Mohan Matthen

    Just got a letter from an outfit called International Innovation, offering to write a three-page article showcasing my work. (Actually, I suspect I would have written the article, and they would have published it.) The cost to me would have been US$5000 or so, I think, going on some information I got by Googling. (I can't be certain; the discussion didn't go that far.)

    International Innovation does exist; it's an open access magazine (http://www.internationalinnovation.com/). The profile would have been "genuine," or at least accurate. And It follows the funding model that Richard Price talks about. I didn't go for it, but it isn't unethical or even a clear shill. At least, I don't think it is. I'd certainly be interested in feedback on this.

    Reply
  4. Mark Anderson

    Regarding the proposed conversation concerning creating free open-access journals, I suggest creating one and covering the minimal website costs oneself, and taking the time to do the editorial work without compensation. It's time consuming, but it's manageable. I Chair our Philosophy department, teach classes, and write, yet I have also recently started up an online free philosophy journal. Although we have an editorial board, I and one of my two Associate Editors do all the first-round reviewing ourselves, and I alone am responsible for building the website, advertising, CFPs, etc. The first issue, for which we have already received several fine submissions, should be up (if all goes as planned) on the first day of spring. Will we succeed? That depends of course on a continued supply of good submissions, interested readers, and the whole process not being much more exhausting than we anticipate. But we're giving it a try. For more information, please see here: http://www.sphpress.com/journal/

    Reply
  5. Alex

    (Assuming the following is legal) what is really needed to make free open-access journals work is for some editorial board to take the initiative and collectively leave at once to form a journal. If the entire board of Well Respected Journal X were to abandon their publisher and form Online-Only Open-Access Journal Y, the reputational lag-time involved in setting up a quality journal would be avoided and a proof of concept would be demonstrated.

    Reply
  6. Anon

    Perhaps I'm an outlier here, but the idea of charging authors for submissions strikes me as particularly counterproductive. Don't we want more submissions from the best philosophers? I can't imagine that an established philosopher like Professor Strawson should be suckered into paying a fee for the privilege of others viewing his articles. Or at least it doesn't seem right. We *want* to read his articles. Wouldn't a reasonable person just post it to their personal website before paying a site like Academia.edu?

    More generally, it strikes me as backward to have the content producers paying for the consumption of said content by end users. This is certainly not how it works in other sectors like, say, the music industry. Granted, I'm not a philosopher, so this perspective is coming from the private sector. But I *am* an end user of philosophy journals and hope to be a part of the profession soon enough. If journals adopted something like an iTunes model, where you paid maybe a dollar or two per article, I believe that would be affordable and produce a good deal more revenue in the long term. In producing a writing sample, for instance, I can afford to pay $20 for 20 articles. (Something like a Spotify model with affordable access to a host of journals would be even better.) But, for example, I'm not going to pay the $42.00 that de Gruyter charges for a *single* article.

    It seems like philosophy departments and universities more generally should be sponsoring open access journals like Philosopher's Imprint. Speaking as a millennial, the online, open-access model is clearly the way of the future. But I do think they should be asking end users to donate as well, not (only) the authors. I firmly believe in open access and have donated modest amounts to Wikipedia, etc. I see no reason why I (and others like me) wouldn't similarly donate to Philosopher's Imprint if asked.

    Reply
  7. perplexed

    The idea that Academia.edu would charge philosophers in this way is outrageous. I hope everyone knows (especially young people trying to make it into the field) that you can always contact the author of an article directly and request a copy of her or his paper. Authors are entitled by contract to share a copy of the paper in this way (indeed, the copy supplied by the journal). What they are often not allowed to do is charge for it. I gladly share my articles when asked, and I expect others to do so as well when I make such requests. I probably request on average 1 article per week.

    Reply
  8. Laurence B. McCullough

    Three comments:

    1. As an National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded investigator, I am familiar with NIH grant applications and their budgets. In effect, the NIH is subsidizing open-access scientific and clinical journals that charge for publication in journals that meet NIH conditions, especially as stated in second quoted text.

    NIH application procedure includes publication costs under “Other Direct Costs:”

    “Publication Costs: You may include the costs associated with helping you disseminate your research findings from the proposed research. If this is a new application, you may want to delay publication costs until the later budget periods, once you have actually obtained data to share.”
    http://grants.nih.gov/grants/developing_budget.htm

    Further elaboration from NIH:
    “Allowable. Charges for publication in professional journals, including author fees, are allowable if such costs are actual, allowable, and reasonable to advance the objectives of the award; are charged consistently (by the journal) regardless of the source of support; and all other applicable rules on allowability of costs are met.”
    https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/nihgps_2013/nihgps_ch7.htm

    2. As near as I can tell from reviewing National Endowment for the Humanities NEH) website, NEH does not cover costs of publishing in open-access journals that charge for publication (and, sometimes also, for review).

    Warning: There are reputable, high-quality open-access scientific and clinical journals with good impact factors (e.g., PLoS ONE) and then there are other open-access scientific and clinical journals.

    3. Academia.edu is not a journal. It is seeking a revenue stream for other purposes than publication of original scholarship. The NIH cost policy for publication would not apply.

    Reply
  9. No paid recs

    I've been following this issue, and there is a fundamental problem with the proposal–so fundamental that I really don't think the folks at Academia should have even solicited advice about it. (Put another way: it should not have been included on any serious brainstorming list). The fundamental problem can be put by way of analogy. Even if you pay $100,000 to have a paper published in a journal by David Publishing, the 'professional value' (= value instrumental to advancement in the profession) is around 0. In fact, it's closer to negative value. The reason is that David Publishing is a vanity press. Publishing in David Publishing is accordingly an embarrassment.

    *IF* it becomes known that paying money can increase the likelihood of getting 'recommended', then the 'professional value' of having a paper recommended on Academia.edu (which is not much, but non-negligible) moves in the direction of David Publishing; and the professional value of all recommendations goes down. There is less professional value in both the recommending and the being recommended.

    Part of Academia.edu's value (in the first place) is that it is a conduit for professional value. The 'payment for increasing likelihood of recommendation' suggestion is thus importantly self-undermining.

    Reply
  10. Dean C. Rowan

    My campus association of librarians (LAUC-B) mounted a conference last year devoted to Open Access, for which the opening keynote was delivered by Michael Eisen, founder of PLoS. I recommend his talk to anybody who can spare the hour:

    There are YouTube videos of some of the other proceedings at the conference, of interest to OA junkies. Eisen is fired up and "radical," an advocate for the proposition that scholars should refuse to submit to the Well Respected Journals. The audience pressed him on the distinction between scientific literature and other kinds of scholarship, and on the palpable one between tenured, established scholars like Eisen himself and younger scholars who can't afford to take a stand.

    Reply
  11. Richard Baron

    As Laurence B. McCullough notes above, Academia.edu is not a journal. I guess one could fairly regard it as a big repository of papers, organized primarily by author. There are repositories elsewhere, for example PhilSci Archive, ( http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/ ), SSRN ( http://ssrn.com/en/ ) and the arXiv ( http://arxiv.org/ ). The possibility of simply putting papers into repositories raises the question of why we still want journals. I am not saying that we don't, but if we get clear about the reasons for having journals, we may get a clearer idea of what needs to be done, and then of how to do it cheaply. (I take it that lining the pockets of commercial publishers is no longer one of the things that need be done – although we should not forget the learned societies that rely on journal income to fund their worthy activities.)

    Here are a few possible reasons for having journals.

    1. Each journal can develop its own character, and an esprit de corps can develop among those who work on it.

    2. Quality control, so as to save people the trouble of ploughing through many papers of poor quality in order to find the good ones. While this is important, it may be that a quick look which allows someone to say "This is a sensible paper" is enough. The refined analysis that narrows the published papers down to a small proportion of the sensible papers might not add much, and might even be counter-productive (by denying some good work an airing), given that in philosophy, opinions as to which are the useful papers can easily, and quite legitimately, vary widely.

    3. Helping the job market to function. Publication records matter, and the levels of prestige of different journals and the knowledge that some journals are very fussy about what they publish can be significant. But should we be thinking about how the job market might work in a world of relatively relaxed open-access publishing, rather than expecting the current way in which the market works to be preserved?

    Lastly, let us not neglect the option of repositories and overlay journals. There is a discussion of this option in mathematics here:

    https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-overlay-journal/

    Reply
  12. Dean C. Rowan

    These (the reasons for and against journals) are among the issues Michael Eisen addresses in his LAUC-B keynote linked in my previous comment. Again, it's well worth viewing. He's a lively speaker, to boot. I misspoke, though, about questions posed from the audience about the implications of the differences in scholarly publication in the sciences versus the humanities for Eisen's proposal. Eisen himself briefly and barely acknowledges the distinction.

    Reply
  13. Jamie Dreier

    This is in response to Alex at #5.

    Not only is it legal, it's been done, in linguistics.
    Elsevier owns the journal Lingua. In response to MIT's open access policy, Elsevier began to require MIT faculty to get an explicit waiver from the university before they could publish, and in other ways actively opposed open access.
    The journal's editors fought with Elsevier over this and eventually resigned en masse. They formed a new journal, Glossa, which is now up and running and open access. (They tried to call it "Lingua" but Elsevier asserted its trademark or copyright or whatever it is.)
    I thought Brian had covered some of the story on this blog but my search on "Glossa" comes up empty; Brian, have I misremembered?
    Kai Von Fintel has been very active in the process:
    http://kaivonfintel.org/2015/11/02/lingua-glossa/

    So, it's possible! And the Lingua->Glossa revolution will at least serve as a warning to journal publishers that even academics get fed up eventually.

    BL COMMENT: I recall posting a link to a story about this incident awhile back, but that may have been it. Thanks for the reminder about it.

    Reply
  14. S.T.

    I like what Richard Baron said above. What reasons are there for why we do not want to dump our papers into paper repositories where they can be freely consumed by many? (I must say I don't have strong feelings on this issue way or another). Presumably, these reasons will include remarks on why journals are significant, and why having a paper in a journal is better than having it on academia.edu, or some other such site. This kind of initiative that academia is running might cause folks to consider the value of the journal as a repository for ideas, and why it should be privileged. That can't be such a bad thing.

    Reply
  15. skeptic

    Recipients of such emails should bear in mind that Academia is a for-profit company funded by venture capitalists, who must be starting to ask for a return on their investments. As a for-profit company, if Academia pursues open access publishing, it is as a means to make money. What they are really trying to achieve is a cheaper for-profit publishing model than the currently dominant model. Can we reasonably hope to be better off once a single for-profit company has replaced all publishers?

    Reply
  16. Martin Klein

    I’d like to draw your attention to some videos from the symposium "Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu?" at Coventry University, 2015/12/08.

    Furthermore, Gary Hall from Coventry University has published some papers about academia.edu and open access, to be found here: https://coventry.academia.edu/GaryHall

    Reply
  17. Susan G. Sterrett

    Regarding the characterization of what academia.edu proposed as " Even if you pay $100,000 to have a paper published. . ." That is not what academia.edu proposed. Read it again. You don't pay first. You submit and then there is a selection process. All before paying.

    What academia.edu proposed is just what most open-access journals do: you submit your paper. _IF_ it is accepted, then there is an author fee for publishing it. Very common publishing model and NO the value is not worthless. It is NOT like the David Publishing model.

    What the value of the publication depends upon is the quality of the selection process. Could be low or could be high, but what the publishing value is has absolutely nothing to do with the existence of an author fee, which is common in many respected science journals. I think the post by Thomas Nadelhoffer put it well.

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