Last month, I received an email from the ARMA@JISCMAIL.AC.UK mailing list, via our research administrator regarding the www.academia.edu project - devised by Richard Price at All Souls College, Oxford.
"- It displays academics around the world in a 'tree' format, according to what university/department they are affiliated with.
"- It enables researchers to keep track of the latest developments in their field - the latest people and papers.
"My hope for the site is that it will list every academic in the world --Faculty members, Post-Docs, and Graduate Students.
"It's gaining some traction - Richard Dawkins is on there (http://oxford.academia.edu/RichardDawkins ), and some other professors are such as Stephen Hawking ( http://cambridge.academia.edu/StephenHawking ) and Noam Chomsky (http://mit.academia.edu/NoamChomsky )."
After filling out a few fields, there is the option to link your publications and other research outputs - interstingly, this gives the article a really high Google Ranking - great for getting noticed online!!
On Tues 14 Oct, someone searched Google using the terms "Jury Directions" (Academia.edu has a handy page of all keywords used). The second hit is my academia.edu page with an article I wrote last year for the Common Law World Review... the publisher website (Vathek) doesn't appear on any of the five pages of Google hits that I looked through before I got bored - so, this seems like a useful feature indeed!
The Terms and Privacy Policy don't offer any assistance for disputes between members - and any disputes between a member and academia.edu will be subject to the laws of Oregon (must be where the servers are located). Given that anyone can alter the name of an institution (I altered Glasgow Caledonian to read Glasgow Caledonian University - but I could have written anything that would then appear on the profile of all members from GCU) and rename departments, then there is room for plenty of both un-intentional mistakes and deliberate errors that will affect many personal member pages quite significantly.
Members may also add research interests and add other members as contacts - this then makes the tree more interactive and allows users to browse for new stuff, both purposefully and serendipitously. The number of research interests is constantly growing - law has 33 sub-research interests - but again, you can add your own and it might get messy - Torts Law exists as a sub-research interest, but someone has also added Torts under Civil Law as a third level interest. Forensics exists as a top level research interest, but also twice more under other topics, Criminology appears a few times under various top level interests. I suppose this might allow members to decide whether they see themselves as social, legal or psychological criminologists.
There are currently 81 law departments listed worldwide - some UK ones are Oxford, Strathclyde, Manchester, Glasgow Caledonian, Nottingham Trent, Teesside, KCL, Durham, Middlesex, Birkbeck, Bangor, Sheffield and Westminster (ordered as found online). There are currently 147 people listed within the top-level law interest - but only 6 within Legal Education - so let's see if this blog post gets any more interest on this social networking site for academia!!
Hey TJ - good to see some positive feedback on this, I've made several new contacts on the site since I made the post - although I think many invites from academia.edu end up classified as spam.
I should probably had made some comments on LinkedIn and NING which also has a large academic contingent, but is less well organised for finding individuals with similar academic interests due to the way that academia.edu is presented.
Yes, I will be at BILETA and looking forward to seeing a bit of Winchester - undecided what to present on...
Posted by: Michael | 20 November 2008 at 18:23
Thanks for the pointer Michael.
It's a particularly well designed site - good looking, easy to use, and clearly heavily influenced by the clean aesthetic of Facebook. There are still some teething problems though - you can link to only one page, for example, which is a problem for those of us who have personal sites as well as official university profiles. Nevertheless, I've signed up and I'll be encouraging my colleagues to do the same. (The promise of a higher google ranking is difficult to resist!)
Will you be at Bileta next year?
TJ
Posted by: TJ McIntyre | 20 November 2008 at 13:22