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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 757. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2020-04-10 08:43:13+00:00 From: Gabriel EganSubject: Re: [Humanist] 33.751: on using academia.edu, continued Dear HUMANISTs My views on the moral imperatives of academic publishing are so out of line with those of a number of (thankfully not all) the contributors to this thread that I'll confine my response to something I think factually incorrect about the opposing view. Norman Gray thinks that personal websites are less effective at the "long-term curation" of our writings than services like Academia.edu are. Personal websites that are entirely free and open are archived by the Internet Archive. I just checked and their Wayback Machine has 115 snapshots of my personal website taken between now and 2003 when I first created the site. I browsed these snapshots and, yep, all my writing is there. By contrast, commercial websites that erect paywalls between authors and readers, like Academia.edu, thereby keep themselves out of the Wayback Machine. Academia.edu could fold at any moment, joining the long-list of formerly powerful walled-garden commercial sites including Friendster, MySpace, Geocities, and others, that died taking their users' content with them. Obviously, the Internet Archive could also die and take its contents with it. But its governance and its contingency planning make that vanishingly less likely than it is with commercial services, not least because of its active role in the International Internet Preservation Consortium. The Internet Archive cares about curation. Academia.edu cares about maximizing profit. Who'd you rather give your stuff to? Regards Gabriel Egan _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
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