This is the second of 2 posts on Academic Social Networking sites.  In the first I wrote about them generally from a user perspective and in the second I’ll talk about them in relation to Open Access Publishing.

When commenting on the proposal to charge Academia.Edu users for recommendation services Richard Price, the founder of Academia.edu, outlined what the purpose of the “silly idea” was:

“We wanted to start the conversation with users 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. When Adnan reached out to users, he was probing the first idea.”

Firstly, Price sees Academic Social Networking sites as innovators (or disruptors) in scholarly communications, in particular in competition with publishers. Both Academia.edu and ResearchGate have form when it comes to encroaching into traditional publisher activities: individuals can get Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) from ResearchGate, and Academia.edu has a version of peer review called sessions.

Secondly, he expects a future where paywall revenues no longer exists – in other words everything is Open Access and subscription publishing vanishes. Maybe that’s not such a surprising scenario as it once was, it also seems to be the opinion of Jo Johnson the Minister for Universities and Science.

Publishers are attempting to manage this in two distinct ways.  Firstly, by transitioning existing subscription journals to hybrid Open Access journals.  In hybrid journals individual articles can be made Open Access for the price of an Article Processing Charge (APC) and they sit alongside articles that have been published in the traditional subscription model (i.e. behind a paywall).  Secondly, publishers operate pure Open Access journals – where all the content is freely available.  This is achieved using various models ranging from volunteerism, direct institutional (HEI) support or APCs.

However, this transition is still not clear to me, there is much to be ironed out:

• The administration of financing the publication of articles at an individual level (e.g. individual Article Processing Charges) isn’t scaleable.
• Will hybrid journals fully transition to pure Open Access journals? Where is that extra APC money going to come from?
• What exactly is an acceptable price for an Article Processing Charge?
• ‘Predatory’ publishers look to exploit a publish or perish culture with low quality publishing.
• Subject repositories are an embedded feature in some academic disciplines.
• Institutional repositories appear, at least in the short term, to have a more prominent role.

And here come the Academic Social Networking sites… it’s beginning to feel a bit crowded!