Social media for academics such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate are used by millions of scholars to share content within their community. These services provide new forms of metrics and ranking, such as download counts, social media sharing, popularity, “score,” or network reach. What is their role in the contemporary neoliberal academia? Digital media are often presented as a source of “democratization” of scholarly publishing. Indeed social media for academics may allow an increasingly casualized academic workforce to find routes around incumbent powers, such as editorial boards or impact factor systems. Yet they also produce an intensification of academic labour that may reinforce entrenched academic hierarchies--after all, tenured faculty do not need to worry too much about Academia.edu. This has epistemic consequences too. These services have the ability to gather and analyze large datasets about reading, citation, and interaction patterns. An increase of their reach and pervasiveness will give them an unprecedented power over processes of gatekeeping and validation. Which kind of scholarship will they produce?
