Things academia.edu (@academia) should do (hint: work with green OA)

academia.edu is a 'social network' for academics. Their latest design mirrors Facebook with its blue header and notification schema. When I saw Ben Lund speak about this at SCONUL, he implied that the outfit wants, in some ways, to disintermediate academic publishers. I would say that they have a long way to go before that happens (peer review, digital preservation, discoverability etc.). That said, I quite like some of the things that they do. It’s good to have an aesthetically pleasing space where I can amplify my research profile. That said, it’s far from perfect but not bad. The other day, I got an email from Adnan Akil at academia.edu, apparently 'because I follow the digital humanities research interest'. I tend to ignore this kind of generic request for participation (if you really want my opinion on this stuff, I’d hope it was because I’ve thought quite a bit about Scholarly Communications, not because I follow the digital humanities research interest). That said, academia.edu seems, from this email, to be working on 'a new feature that lets users create discussions online', which sounds quite interesting, but not exactly revolutionary. Anyway, here’s some stuff that I think academia.edu should get on with fixing, rather than implementing, basically, a forum ..."