<blockquote>"35 million academics, independent scholars and graduate students as users, who collectively have uploaded some eight million texts"</blockquote>
35 million users is a lovey number, but their engagement must be spectacularly bad if only 8 million texts are available.
<blockquote>"the platform essentially bans access for academics who, for whatever reason, don’t have an Academia.edu account. It also shuts out non-academics."</blockquote>
They must have changed this, as pretty much anyone with an email address (including non-academics) can create a free account and use the system.
<blockquote>“I don’t trust academia.edu,”</blockquote>
Given his following discussion, I can only imagine what he thinks of big publishers in academia and *that* debate.
<blockquote>"McGill’s Dr. Sterne calls it “the gamification of research,”</blockquote>
Most research is too expensive to really gamify in such a simple manner. Many researchers are publishing to either get or keep their jobs. And if anything, the institutionalization of "publish or perish" has already accomplished the "gamification", Academia.edu is just helping to increase the reach of the publication. Given that research shows that most published research isn't even read, much less cited, how bad can Academia.edu really be?
The article rails against not knowing what the business model is or what's happening with the data, I suspect that the platform itself doesn't have a very solid business plan and they don't know what to do with the data themselves except tout the numbers. I'd suspect they're trying to build critical mass so that they can cash out by selling to one of the big publishers like Elsevier, who might actually be able to use such data. And on that subject, where's the comparison to the rest of the competition including ResearchGate.net or Mendeley.com, which in fact was purchased by Elsevier?
In sum, it sounds to me like a bunch of luddites running around yelling "fire", particularly when I'd imagine that most feed into the more corporate side of publishing in major journals rather than publishing it themselves on their own websites. I'd further suspect they're probably not even practicing samizdat.
For academics who really want to spend some time and thought on a potential solution to all of this, I'll suggest that they start out by owning their own domain and own their own data and work. The #IndieWeb movement certainly has an interesting philosophy that's a great start in fixing the problem; it can be found at http:/