I only see winners in this: I think both Elsevier and academia.edu are bloody plagues, and whoever loses, I'm happy. The way I see this, either people are turned off academia.edu or away from Elsevier, both of which are desirable results in my opinion. So...good job, I suppose?
I'm a bit familiar with the current events and business practices that bring vitriol against Elsevier. Not so much for academia.edu though and I've only heard of it a few other times as I'm not in academia. What causes you to feel negatively about it?
Academia.edu bothers me on a somewhat different level: It becomes yet another of the levels were academia pretends to be more and more like the business world (with LinkedIn). The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding subtle peer-pressure to everybody else.
One of the things we get told frequently is that we need to "expand our social media presence", i.e. to get LinkedIn and academia.edu. This is essentially highly functioning hypocrasy in my opinion, because the same people who advocate it or "follow" your profile, if met directly, do not give a shit about what you are working on.
I have enough of the "so...what are you working on?" question that immediately follows the exchange of names. It is almost always followed by the shortest possible description, because, really, nobody gives a shit. Often enough, even the general topic area is enough to make other people glaze over and switch off. Academia.edu etc. pretend that there is great interest where there is none, and at the same time further the already backstabby and highly disingenious environment within academia.
At least, that's my take on it.
[edit]: It also furthers the already widespread plague of inflating your CV with absolutely bloody everything you've ever done. Given a 15-minute talk as an introduction to a class or seminar? That's a "talk" now, apparently. Organised a club that met (perhaps once) to discuss the importance of petting animals during the exam period, and that asks for access to petting animals for everybody[1]. Onto your profile it goes. Wrote an "article" for the "journal" you and those other people you know "published", made up of your and your friends' articles? Publications! etc.
[1]: I wish I were kidding. I am not. However, since posting a citation for this would reveal a bit more about me than I care to share here, I won't. Take it or leave it!
The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding subtle peer-pressure to everybody else.
Kinda like academic publishing, right? Pretty sure the Erdos number[1] was around well before Academia.edu.
To make it clear - I think a lot of Academia.edu's practices are annoying - login wall for papers etc. But academia would be well served if it took better advantage of some of the possibilities online collaboration brought (think of the Polymath projects). CiteULike/arxiv cannot be the high point of online academic publishing.
The thing is, not all strands of academia have collaboration even as a central focus. I don't see it very often in the humanities that articles or books have multiple collaborators. The normal thing is either the article or monograph written by an individual. The other option are journals or collections made up of these kinds of articles. Sure, it's not unheard of that people collaborate, but even bigger projects usually follow the idea that what you publish is yours, so you are more likely to see a publication series with individual volumes by different people, or the above mentioned collections, where (maybe!) introductions or overviews are written collaboratively.
This has partly to do with the dreadful "tooling" in many cases, i.e. in most cases Word with handwritten citations. If you are lucky, people use Endnote or Zotero. If you are really lucky, you might encounter somebody who knows what (Open|Libre) Office is. Your options for collaborations are thus: Google Docs (if people can manage the technical complexity) or mailing around Word files.
"The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding subtle peer-pressure to everybody else."
I hadn't looked at Academia.edu through this lens before. I think it's in a position to accomplish a lot more, so here's hoping they focus on 'impact' and not just 'engagement'.
As one can see from my ever so slightly sour comments, my personal experience somewhat taints my view of the platform as a whole. Essentially, the people whose company I'd enjoy the least are most likely to have the appropriate profiles. I'm sure there are other things one could do with the platform, and I'm sure not everybody is like that. However, this isn't a balanced pro-and-con argument, it's a rant, so there is that! ;)
