Who owns your information?

I think sharing is wonderful.  I particularly love sharing ideas because for me at least, they are a Public Good. No one is excluded, and when I share an idea with you, it costs me nothing, and yet you still benefit. William S. Burrows described language as a virus, Richard Dawkings coined 'memetics' in The Selfish Gene, and Seth Godin talks about the 'Ideavirus.' All of these discus the power in the spread of ideas, as contagious, self-replicating entities. But at the core of our society is the idea of ownership. As much as I or anybody else loves to share, what happens to the ownership of our ideas when we let them fly?

I would like to begin by saying that say that in my experience Scholarly Collaboration Networks are a wonderful opportunity for early career researchers to build their reputations and make collaborative contacts. The twin summits of collaboration and engagement in all their incarnations form part of most university strategies. Early career academics are often encouraged to blog, tweet, deposit, and network their way to career success. While undergraduates everywhere are told to use social media to boost their employability. From my own work, I know that Mendley is particularly popular among the Life Sciences. Other platforms such as ResearchGate boast nine million researchers (and 45 Nobel laureates), while Epernicus Network is the Tinder of the academic world, promising to connect you with 'people and expertise in your scientific network.'

Image credit: Motherboard OpenClipartVectors (Public Domain, Pixabay) and LSE Impact Blog.

However, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of these services are owned by huge venture capital and private equity firms: Acadmeia.edu is funded by SPARK Capital and despite having a .edu top-level domain, it is not an educational website; ResearchGate is funded by the likes of Accel-KKR among others; and Mendeley is owned by Elsevier. The main interest of these organisations (indeed, their legal obligation) is to make a profit for their shareholders. Academia.edu recently came under scrutiny when it contacted some authors and asked them if they would be interested in "paying a small fee to submit any upcoming papers to our board of editors to be considered for recommendation." Which sounds perilously close to vanity publishing. CEO Richard Price has gone on record as saying that he wants to charge companies for access to user data, as well as pimping information on "insights on which research and researchers are gaining traction."

Which brings me back to the concept of ownership. Because there’s also the naiveté with which some people use these services. Like when publisher PDFs are uploaded to Collaborative Research Networks over preprints/postprints in our institutional repository for example. Leading to unknowing, or even wilful disregarding of copyright, which is after all, the prime example of idea-ownership. So I guess it's worth thinking about what you give away for free. Because sometimes folks will try and sell it back to you, and other times it turns out it never belonged to you in the first place.