Galen Strawson (Texas) calls to my attention that he received the following e-mail from academia.edu:
From: Adnan Akil <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, 27 January 2016 at 18:28 To: galen strawson <[email protected]> Subject: Certification Value
Hi Dr. Strawson, My name is Adnan, I'm the Product Director here at Academia. I noticed you had received a few recommendations on your papers. Would you be open to paying a small fee to submit any upcoming papers to our board of editors to be considered for recommendation? You'd only be charged if your paper was recommended. If it does get recommended then you'll see the natural boost in viewership and downloads that recommended papers get. Would love to hear your thoughts. Best, Adnan
He asked me what I thought of this, and I said it sounded a bit corrupt, but Galen reached out to Richard Price, the founder of academia.edu, who shared the following explanation with Galen (and gave me permission to share it as well):
Dear Galen,
Thanks for getting in touch. Yes - this is a somewhat radical and somewhat crazy idea. It has already caused a ruckus on Twitter. We are probing at how to develop an open access publishing model with a lower fee than the average open access journal. We want to start the conversation 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. Adnan's question was probing the first idea.
Richard
Comments are open for thoughts from readers.
