Academia.edu, repositories, and Facebook Connect
I’m surprised, but little (that I’ve seen) has blogged about the relationship between Academia.edu and repositories. I have no idea how well Academia.edu is taking off, but I can imagine that if it does take off in the same viral fashion that Facebook has, then academic staff will want to make sure their profiles, in terms of listing papers and talks, are up to date.
Academia.edu allows users to upload their papers and talks along with minimal metadata (title, more info, abstract). This information is then presented on their profile page. A typical example can be seen here. The web page is displayed smartly and uses a nice embedded scribd box to display the paper inline on the page.
As repository people, how does this affect us? How should we engage with it? As well as uploading the actual files for each paper or talk, you can instead provide a link to the paper if it already has a URL, which it will if it is in a repository. If staff want to use Academia.edu, we should be selling the benefits of our repositories and Academia.edu combined. By using both you get all the benefits from using the repository, and the social aspect of using a social network.
Academia.edu has just launched FacebookConnect which allows Academia.edu users to link their account with their Facebook account. By doing this, whenever they upload an item into their profile, a note is posted on their Facebook profile giving the details.
This is a different way of getting updates of scholarly activity into Facebook than my Facebook repository deposit tool, and is more akin to the way of working that Pete Johnston writes about where he says the deposit often happens in the actual tool (in this case the repository) and then updates the social network.
Perhaps we should be creating a similar type of Facebook connection with our repositories, allowing them to also publish these updates to the users’ profiles?
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: repositories
on December 18, 2008 at 10:32 am
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I think a Facebook connection tool is an excellent idea. As for Academia.edu, I couldn’t find any guidance about uploading papers. Surely the same issues repositories face over copyright etc. apply?
on December 18, 2008 at 11:31 am
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Hi Stuart
This post may be of interest:
http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2008/social-networking-with-a-brain-a-critical-review-of-academic-sites/
There’s little I like about Academia.edu, and I hope natural selection selects it out. I’m dubious about its repository claims/features: it can do what it likes with OA stuff of course – and as long as it exists it may be a useful dissemination tool like FB, YouTube, Slideshare, etc, etc – but /responsibility/ for management and preservation of valuable material still lies with institutions and other legitimate bodies (archives, libraries, research councils, JISC, etc) – not “these guys” http://www.academia.edu/about
What’s it even doing in .edu? To be in .ac.uk wouldn’t it need to be part of some legitimate, sanctioned JISC/JANet/RC type venture with hopefully some sound backing?
I’ll pass on the views of a senior academic, with which I entirely concur: “the idea that the fundamental taxon is the university department is flawed … it erects artificial barriers that need not exist in this medium, and also rubs one’s nose in the fact that some of the *last* people that one would want to link with are sitting immediately beside you in your institutional hierarchy … [As a repository, it's] a spurious subversion of established tracks toward ‘good practice’.”
Richard
on December 21, 2008 at 4:43 pm
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Hi Stuart, hi Richard,
may I point you to Mendeley (www.mendeley.com), of which I am the co-founder? Our idea is mainly based on developing research paper management tools, both on the desktop and online. In the long run, we also aim to become a repository, but not based on a departmental taxonomy, but rather a use-based one.
Let me explain: We’re co-founded/funded by some of the people behind Last.fm, the social music service. Last.fm has created an open music database in which artists and songs are linked to each other based on collaborative filtering, i.e. “people who listened to this song also listened to…”. We’d like to do the same for research papers: “People who had this research paper in their libraries also had this one…”.
In our opinion, this use-based taxonomy might be even better than citation-based (or journal-based) taxonomies in uncovering parallels between research streams. We explain these ideas in a bit more detail in a recent IEEE publication: http://escience2008.iu.edu/exhibits/mendeley.shtml (in case you’re interested, I could mail you a longer version).
Best,
Victor
on July 1, 2009 at 7:11 pm
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Stewart Lewis wrote: “Academia.edu allows users to upload their papers and talks along with minimal metadata (title, more info, abstract). This information is then presented on their profile page. A typical example can be seen here. The web page is displayed smartly and uses a nice embedded scribd box to display the paper inline on the page.”
I uploaded a paper yesterday and can no longer find it. It is not available on my page. Although in the edit function I can still find the ‘add a paper’ link, in the non-edit display of my page, there is no longer any reference to papers. As well as this I am listed as having published 4 books instead of 1 book because the info I entered has been repeated 3 times.
Sheila N