An article made the rounds of social media recently on whether or not the for-profit website academia.edu is outflanking the open access movement. It’s a great article that I’d encourage people to read closely. Academia.edu, in case you didn’t know, is basically tumblr for academics — a bunch of hosted blog sites tied together into a social network. I am deeply ambivalent about academia.edu (and its more sciency cousin Research Gate) but in the end I use the site and even accepted one of the many ‘editorships’ they provided to people, which allows you to rate up content on their site.
There’s a lot to be said about academia.edu, most of which can be found in the post I linked to above. But what that piece sparked in my head was the way academia.edu and other sites enable (and perhaps even promote?) the other enemy of the open access movement: law-scoffing consumerism.