Discussion: Scholarly hub – open alternative to Research Gate

Facebook and Twitter seem to be the most popular platforms for academic exchange, but they have obvious problems and limitations. Do we need an open alternative to Research Gate? Check out https://www.scholarlyhub.org. Would anyone use this? We’d have to have a community there to make it worthwhile.

Their latest advisory board member Subhashish Panigrahi is an interesting guy:

“I have been working with 63 different tribes from the Indian state of Odisha speaking various diverse languages.” From “Rising Voices: Indigenous language Digital Activism”, available here:

6 thoughts on “Discussion: Scholarly hub – open alternative to Research Gate

  1. Mary Beckman

    As a dinosaur who doesn’t use Facebook and Twitter, I was bit surprised to see them described as “platforms for academic exchange”. I do use Research Gate as a place to archive papers where it is easy for others to find them and as a place to look for others’ papers, though, and it would be good to promote open alternatives to those functions. Has anyone been using the new Social Sciences arXiv for this? See https://www.socialsciencespace.com/

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  2. Eric Bakovic

    I agree that we need an open alternative to ResearchGate and the like, as well as something more inclusive and stable than ROA, LingBuzz, etc. David Barner (UCSD Psychology & Linguistics) was recently involved in the development of PsyArXiv, and is working with a group of others to try something similar for Linguistics (LingArXiv). Any efforts along these lines should probably be coordinated!

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  3. Joe Pater Post author

    Great to hear about LingArXiv – PsyArXiv looks very cool. The other development in Psych that seems to be really taking off is the Open Science Foundation – my colleague Brian Dillon is making good use of it, for instance.

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    1. Eric Bakovic

      PsyArXiv is “powered by OSF preprints” — that is, Open Science Foundation is a key part of that effort as well.

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  4. Joe Pater Post author

    I’ll look forward to having a conversation about this stuff in person Eric – hopefully we can find a few minutes at the LSA. One thing I find a bit puzzling is why archives continue to pop up. The advice I got last time I started this kind of discussion in Phonolist was that we should just be putting stuff on our university archives, and then worrying about indexing rather than actual storage.

    BTW, here’s a Wired article that interviews Barner and one of the Scholarly Hub founders:

    https://www.wired.com/story/its-gonna-get-a-lot-easier-to-break-science-journal-paywalls/

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  5. Eric Bakovic

    Thanks, Joe — I’d missed that Wired article. Let’s definitely talk at LSA.

    I just skimmed back over the previous Phonolist discussion you mention (https://websites.umass.edu/phonolist/2016/06/12/discussion-archives/) — my read is that there were lots of ideas discussed there, only one of which was “post to your insitutional repository (or individual webpage) and let indexing sort it out”. I like that idea, but I’m not sure it’s the best solution, nor do I think it should be the only option out there. I’ll quote myself from that discussion; we were discussing subfield-specific repositories vs. a field-wide one, but the point of allowing and encouraging different models to see what works still holds.

    “My own ideal outcome in all of this would be to have a new and better system for scholarly communication, one that encompasses the whole field of linguistics and that serves as a model for other whole fields. But I’ve become convinced that such an outcome can only be attained if several different models emerge from different subfields, such that the best ideas that serve the specific needs of each of those subfields can be identified and implemented in an eventual, more inclusive system.”

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