Like Facebook, only with brains and sensible copyright terms!

It seems that someone has finally come up with a decent, intellectual alternative to Facebook.com: Welcome to Academia.edu.

It’s intellectual, because it’s made for academics - in a broad sense: Anyone from the most distinguished professor to the most miserable undergrad can join the ranks of online brains. I’ll get to the decency.

You can share your papers and read others’, find people who share your research interests, spot potential collaborators on future projects, heck, you can even date someone if you dare!

Everything is arranged around a ‘university taxonomy’, the idea being that you add yourself to your institution or department, and there’s even a place for independent researchers. Besides that it’s a neat tool to keep track of research in any area you like.

It’s a bit like Facebook, but without all the fudge. No ‘boxes’, no 3rd party apps (yet) who’ll collect your personal information. Not too much annoying silliness.

Copyright

And the decent part? You maintain the copyright to all your stuff. If you look hard at the Facebook Terms of Use you might discover stuff like this:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

This means that Facebook can practically do anything with your content. Contrary to the Facebook flocking birds (oops, that’s me too), the guys behind academia.edu figured that users might actually read the terms of use before they post their nude pics.

Academics are used to reading huge amounts of written matter and we generally try to understand the implications of these texts. That’s what we do for a living. So when you read the terms of use you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the fact that your copyrights are not cropped and mangled beyond recognition:

Academia.edu does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, papers, books, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the Academia.edu Services. After posting your Content to the Academia.edu Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose.

And further:

By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the Academia.edu Services, you hereby grant to Academia.edu a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the Academia.edu Services. The license you grant to Academia.edu is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to Academia.edu), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that Academia.edu is not required to pay you for the use on the Academia.edu Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that Academia.edu is able to use its affiliates and subcontractors such as Internet content delivery networks to provide the Academia.edu Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the Academia.edu Services are global in reach). This license will terminate at the time you remove your Content from the Academia.edu Services. The license does not grant Academia.edu the right to sell your Content, nor does the license grant Academia.edu the right to distribute your Content outside of the Academia.edu Services.

There’s no ‘irrevocable, perpetual’ license here and no right for the company ‘to prepare derivative works [...] and to grant and authorize sublicenses’ of your stuff. Of course there’s the usual internet legal newspeak here and there - these people have a business to run, after all - but the terms are very compliant, and contrary to Facebook they actually take the time to explain the legal terms. Basically, you still have control of your content when you post it on academia.edu.

Come and play!

In the big picture academia.edu opens new ways of connecting and collaborating across institutions, continents and scientific disciplines. It still has a long way to go before it’ll be as addictive and smooth-running as Facebook but I think it’s worth giving the place a chance.

Come over and let’s play at academia.edu!

[Disclaimer: Let's just be clear about a few things here before the flame war and the court trials start: I'm not affiliated with or paid by academia.edu or Facebook. This is not an advertisment, but rather a review of the academia.edu service. I have no interest in the succes or failure of either service.]