Impact of Social Sciences – Algorithmic accountability in scholarship: what we can learn from #DeleteAcademiaEdu

"The networking and article-sharing platform academia.edu has been at the centre of a controversy in the academic community for the past few months. In 2015, the website invited several researchers to join the ‘Editor Program’, a group tasked with probing issues of unpaid labour on such platforms. Later that year, the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University hosted a symposium, ‘Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu’. In early 2016, an employee of academia.edu contacted academics to enquire if they would be interested in paying for promotion of their content on the website (an article in the Chronicle summarises the event). The hashtag #DeleteAcademiaEdu relayed these debates on Twitter about the incompatibility between scholarly values and paying for visibility, and several researchers announced their decision to close their profile. These debates around academia.edu are a great opportunity to reflect on algorithmic accountability. On the front end, the use of algorithms on such platforms results in positive outcomes for users, such as recommendations of articles based on similar interests, or analytics assessing the impact and reach of scholarship. On the back end, though, the lack of transparency in the circulation and brokerage of academics’ data threatens to undermine the integrity of researchers ..."