Why move from Academia.edu to SocArXiv?

Imagine if every day you could sit at your computer and see a list of every single new paper
published in your specific research area all on one website. This is what scientists working
astronomy, physics, and other disciplines have at arXiv.org. In my fieldwork with scientists I've
seen how they often have a routine of looking at all the new work in their field every day, and its
easy to do. All of this is addressed well in Matt Thompsons post on Savage Minds, which asks a
question many of us in anthropology have been asking (even without knowing what to call it) for a
long time: What is arXiv and how can we get one?

Many of us started using Academia.edu so that we could share preprints, manuscripts, and other
writing with colleagues and the public. In other disciplines, like Physics, Astrophysics,
Mathematics, Computer Science, and Statistics - researchers can upload their pre-prints to
arXiv.org, a repository hosted by Cornell University Library.

In the social sciences and humanities, weve never had a central repository for material like this,
and Ive always felt it was a gap in our disciplines. It prevents us from learning about the newest
work regularly, consistently, and easily, and from getting feedback and interacting with a wider
range of colleagues beyond our own networks, and from sharing our work with science journalists
who might report on it, with the public, and with scholars around the world who dont have
database access. Most journals will allow you to post a pre-print version of a published article, if
they dont allow you to post the final print version. Many of us have wanted to share both working
papers and pre-prints, and weve done it here and there.

We have mostly relied on stop gaps, like Academia.edu, and others, where we could share these
documents, and see the work of others. Some universities have repositories, but again, each
university has a different repository.

SocArXiv finally offers a serious alternative. And it isnt just for social science - it offers the potential
of interdisciplinary interactions because its a repository for Arts, Humanities, Education, Law, and
Social Sciences.

SocArXiv is hosted by the Center for Open Science with a steering committee made up of
academics and research librarians, not venture capitalists like Academia.edu. This is an academic
project, unlike Academia.edu which uses the .edu website domain name to look like an academic
project while its actually a for-profit company using our content which we freely upload.

Now, as Academia.edu introduces paid premium memberships and special features only to paid
members, and continues to monetize our content and our data while keeping it behind a
membership access wall, its a good time to finally move.

I think the case for SocArXiv was already made with the popularity of Academia.edu, which
became so popular precisely because our universities werent providing a service that filled this
role. SocArXiv is doing that and with support, I hope that universities will sign on, and it will
become like the arXiv.org is for the hard sciences - part of our disciplinary practice to upload new
work and read new work every day - easily, all in one place.