[ilds] M.G. Vassanji into Tunc

[James Gifford]

Hi Bruce,

Since we're moving into /Tunc/ and the Firm, I think it's worth dwelling 
on this just a bit...

Academia.edu is useful, but it also comes with two limitations: 
copyright and revenue.  It's a for profit organization beholden to its 
investors to develop a revenue stream through advertising and data 
mining, meaning it tracks you, just like Google or Facebook.  Notice 
that you need to create a profile in order to download anything that 
others have uploaded and given away for "free."

That might not seem like much, but like email or Facebook, whenever one 
logs in, it records your IP address (just like you have in your email 
header).  The IP is a unique identifier for your device and how it's 
accessing the internet -- one might login to Gmail to check 
correspondence and then logout, but the IP has been recorded.  From that 
point forward, anywhere that IP address goes that accesses resources 
through Google (search terms, websites that rely on Google Adwords, 
etc.), Google creates a record for that IP address.  For instance, if 
you look to my email header (by default, it's not displayed by your 
email application, but that doesn't mean it isn't there), it will tell 
you I'm writing this email in Thunderbird use Shaw as my internet 
service provider, and have an IP address on Old Yale Road in Surrey, 
British Columbia.  It will even tell you the city block I'm on. 
Thereby, we generate an excellent record of our tastes and interests 
that can be valuable for marketing purposes.  Ditto for Facebook.  When 
the product is "free," the product is really you.

Academia.edu is part of that process, and it's also not immune to 
copyright -- the contract for academic publications very often transfers 
copyright to the publisher rather than the author, in many cases 
specifically to prohibit distribution outside of the paywall.  It's an 
oddity that academics often work in non-profit or public environments 
and compete for public funding to produce work intended for public 
consumption and the public good yet for purposes of tenure or promotion 
are compelled to publish their work in a way to assigns all rights to 
for-profit private enterprise.  One can now even "buy" Open Access for 
one's own publications, which really means paying the anticipated 
revenues: evidently an articles is worth a couple thousand dollars these 
days...  The requirement for Open Access for publicly-funded research in 
the UK is diverting a larger share of public research funding into 
paying those fees rather than driving academics to publish through Open 
Access resources.

One of the reasons the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism is 
interesting is that the metadata has been specifically held for an Open 
Access project in Linked Modernisms.

The Firm could have thought of no better model.  The content is 
user-generated but owned by the Firm, the user is the product up for 
sale or rented out for metadata, and people will even pay to get it!

All best,
James

On 2016-05-13 6:53 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> James,
>
> Thanks for the links.  That’s helpful.  The “open access” (OA) movement
> is indeed growing, particularly in areas like Classics but not so much
> in English literature.  I’ll mention one other source:  Academia.edu
> <http://academia.edu>, which is not restricted to “academics” but
> includes anyone who wants to sign into the database and provide a
> “profile” or entry.  It’s free.  That platform enables one to upload
> his/her publications or whatever and make them freely available to all
> and sundry.  I’ll note that Donald Kaczvinsky has an entry (search under
> his name) and has made his article, “Memlik’s House and Mountolive’s
> Uniform:  Orientalism, Ornamentalism, and /The Alexandria Quartet,”/
> available for downloading.  Vassanji does not have any papers available.
>
> Bruce