It has been a hectic morning attempting to read and respond to the flurry of activity surrounding my column this week over at Forbes, which argues that scholars should remove their work from the for-profit platform Academia.edu. I am neither the first nor the last academic to harangue members of the academy to take this step, and thus I wanted to outline here some of the historiography of the debate, my argument against the for-profit platform, the alternatives, and end with a call to action (i.e., I shall follow the historian’s order of operations).

My predecessors:

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Academia, Not Edu,” Planned Obsolescence: Falling indelibly into the past (October 26, 2015).  Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association (MLA) remarked on her blog, “the first thing to note is that, despite its misleading top level domain (which was registered by a subsidiary…