Why I Left Researchgate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube Miguel Abambres

Please Do Not Censor This – Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, LinkedIn, and YouTube Miguel Abambres

To cite this version:

Miguel Abambres. Please Do Not Censor This – Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, LinkedIn, and YouTube. 2020. hal-02728160v3

HAL Id: hal-02728160 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02728160v3 Preprint submitted on 3 Aug 2020

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés.

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

PLEASE DO NOT CENSOR THIS. WHY I LEFT RESEARCHGATE, ZENODO, OSF, LINKEDIN, AND YOUTUBE

M. Abambres GS, email

Note: If by any chance some links/references cited in this article have already been censored by the time you read this paper, please email me and I´ll do my best to send those contents over to you.

Abstract: This work exposes what recently and suddenly (i.e., without prior warning) happened to some of my scholarly publications / accounts in some of the most popular content-sharing platforms, such as (i) ResearchGate (aka the FACEBOOK for scientists – you can imagine all the cons), (ii) Zenodo (owned by CERN), (iii) Open Science Framework or OSF (owned by the Center for Open Science), (iv) LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft), and (v) YouTube (a Google subsidiary). All these digital platforms have some in common – they are centralized, i.e. controlled by a single entity, which makes it easier to destroy freedom of speech. Opinion / review papers by myself and co-authors disappeared from some platforms, own accounts were blocked, and also other kinds of censorship (my definition of it) might have occurred, all throughout the second semester of 2019. In this eprint I provide my judgements about it and evidence (webpage archives) of each denounced fact. Lastly, I present my advice for those who are sick to death of feeding big companie$ and wanna take part in the next digital revolution.

Keywords: Censorship, Freedom of Speech, Academic Freedom, Big Tech, Big Money, Centralized Platforms, Decentralized Platforms, P2P, Blockchain, Social Networks, Academia, Higher Education, Scholarly Publications, Scientific Publishing, Academic Publishing, Academic Repositories, ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, LinkedIn, YouTube, Sustainability, Whistleblowing.

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

1. Censorship vs. Freedom of Speech “Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or ‘inconvenient’. Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and corporations” (Wikipedia). Throughout this paper, the term (online) censorship will be used with the following meaning

Removal or dissemination restrictions, without a fair reason, of content published by some user in a digital platform.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states (Oltmann 2019, EFF 2019, UN 2020)

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

“Contrary to popular belief, the internet is not as free and open as one might think – all of our activity passes through the hands of private corporations (internet service providers, content hosts), and they decide what you can say or see on the internet … It’s not just in authoritarian regimes where censorship takes place – research has shown that it also happens in dozens of ‘democratic’ countries … Internet Service Providers (ISP) from around the world receive many requests from western governments to block or remove content … However, ISP and content hosts also block or remove content without coercion” (in How Internet Censorship Works). Some research has been conducted on whether social media censorship can radicalize people – for instance, in 2018 (ref) an active shooter broke into YouTube Headquarters in California and wounded a few people before killing herself.

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write. Hugo L. Black

I can’t change the world. I can’t rid the world of hatred and bigotry. But I can tell, live, and write and teach about my truth, and I can encourage others to do the same. Rob Sanders

With threats ranging from “no-platforming” controversial speakers, to governments trying to suppress critical voices, and corporate controls on research funding, academics and writers from across the world have signed Index on Censorship’s open letter “Academic freedom is under threat and needs urgent protection” (Baker 2015).

Throughout history, the world’s universities have been places where people push the boundaries of knowledge... Without the freedom to study, research and teach, the world would be a poorer place. Not only would fewer discoveries be made, but we will lose understanding of our history, and our modern world. Academic freedom needs to be defended from government, commercial and religious pressure. in Baker (2015)

Soh (2018) considers that, today, (i) facts are deemed controversial if they deviate from accepted narratives, and (ii) professors must self-censor out of fear of being condemned and losing their jobs.

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

2. Criticisms of Academic / Scientific Publishing Platforms

2.1 ResearchGate

I’ve texted and emailed some colleagues who were victims of blocking and censorship on ResearchGate (RG). In case you wanna talk with those researchers, their names and contacts are:

Gianluigi Segalerba Thomas Kilian (check out his video about it) Arian Bahrami (check his complaint on ResearchGate)

On ResearchGate, you might get across “fake” profiles like this one. In that list of research papers, search for the name Abambres and you´ll find a reference to the paper I have co-authored with the real Kim J.R. Rasmussen, who looks like this. According to Van Noorden (2014),

Some of the apparent profiles on the site are not owned by real people … are created automatically by scraping info from around the web. That annoys researchers who do not want to be on the site, and who feel that the pages misrepresent them — especially when they discover that ResearchGate will not take down the pages when asked.

Surprised? Now check ResearchGate’s community guidelines with respect to fake information on the platform, and I hope you understand that you should not care much about what digital companies (at least nowadays) write on the “community guidelines” and “terms of service” (politically correct) sections of their platforms, because at the end most of those companies will do whatever is necessary to increase their profit and/or popularity.

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

ResearchGate is renowned as the ultimate academic spam email machine, often sending unsolicited invitations to be co-author on articles you had nothing to do with … More recently, emails have even got more ‘clickbaity’, not actually revealing anything useful unless you click through to the site … in Tenant (2017)

ResearchGate website and Twitter profile land pages showed captivating phrases like “make research open to all” or “make your research visible” back in October 2019 and April 2020, respectively, but then censorship and user blocking actually takes place on that platform, as aforesaid and later described in sections 3 to 5. Those sections address three controversial papers of mine that disappeared from my former, and sole, ResearchGate account, which I deleted in November 9th 2019. Arildsen (2016) argued that RG was not really open access, despite being free, and criticized RG’s strategy to lead researchers to upload their papers to the platform.

2.2 Zenodo

Nothing to mention other than the censorship addressed in sections 3 to 5.

2.3 Open Science Framework (OSF)

They disabled my account (the [email protected] in the URL of this archived page is one of my personal email addresses) and all my papers were gone between late October and early November 2019, with no previous warning (even though they argue that OSF is “the place to share your research”). A few weeks later I get an email from their CEO asking for donations, and where ideas like “openness in the scientific community” are emphasized (LOL) – poor parasites. Some proofs I had papers published on several preprint servers hosted on the OSF: - https://archive.md/GCErs - https://archive.vn/M3lFn

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

- Google Scholar example

3. Bye Bye Peer-Reviewed Publishing (Abambres et al. 2019) In this section I´m presenting some proofs that show the paper “Bye Bye Peer- Reviewed Publishing” was effectively published on several platforms, and later censored. Google Scholar indexed several versions of that publication (URL1, URL2).

3.1 (Proof) Published on ResearchGate before May 2019

URL1, URL2, URL3, URL4 (the paper, former ref. 332626809 on ResearchGate, had 9610 reads by mid October 2019).

3.2 (Proof) Removed from ResearchGate after May 2019

URL

3.3 (Proof) First Published on Zenodo on April 24th, 2019

URL1, URL2, URL3

3.4 (Proof) Removed from Zenodo after April 24th, 2019

URL1, URL2

3.5 (Proof) First Published on OSF on April 24th, 2019

URL1, URL2

3.6 (Proof) Removed from OSF after April 24th, 2019

URL

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

4. Research Counts, Not the Journal (Abambres et al. 2018) In this section I´m presenting some proofs that show the paper “Research Counts, Not the Journal” was effectively published on several platforms, and later censored. Google Scholar indexed several versions of that publication (URL1, URL2).

4.1 (Proof) Published on ResearchGate in November 2018

URL1, URL2, URL3

4.2 (Proof) Removed from ResearchGate after publication

URL

4.3 (Proof) Published on Zenodo during 2018

URL

4.4 (Proof) Removed from Zenodo before Nov 18th, 2019

URL

4.5 (Proof) Published on OSF in late 2018 and early 2019

URL1, URL2

4.6 (Proof) Removed from OSF before Nov 14th, 2019

URL

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

5. How (Not) to Lead Academia (Abambres 2019) In this section I´m presenting some proofs that show the paper “How (Not) to Lead Academia” was effectively published on several platforms, and later censored. Google Scholar indexed several versions of that publication (URL1, URL2).

5.1 (Proof) Published on ResearchGate in early September, 2019

URL

5.2 (Proof) Removed from ResearchGate before November 2nd, 2019

URL1, URL2

5.3 (Proof) Published on Zenodo before November 2nd, 2019

URL

5.4 (Proof) Removed from Zenodo before November 17th, 2019

URL

5.5 (Proof) Published on OSF before September 7th, 2019

URL1, URL2

5.6 (Proof) Removed from OSF before November 14th, 2019

URL

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

Fig. 1. If all resisted, the World would be a better place (pic source).

6. [Article on LinkedIn] Fuck The Impact Factor In this section I´m presenting some proofs that show the article “Fuck The Impact Factor” was effectively published on LinkedIn, and later censored. That article promoted the video stored in Abambres (2019).

6.1 (Proof) Published on LinkedIn on Nov 29th, 2019

URL 9

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

6.2 (Proof) Removed from LinkedIn before Dec 27th, 2019

Articles in my profile as seen from other user account (the aforementioned article is not there), URL2 and URL3 are the proofs. The last two links show that searching the article by its URL also leads to the conclusion that it was removed from LinkedIn – if you click on that article on this page (the same as in 6.1), you get to know how the URL of a LinkedIn article was constructed by then (another example of that construction, for an article with “[video]” in its title, is here).

6.3 LinkedIn accounts blocked

The account/profile linkedin.com/in/abambresm (see Fig. 2) was created on Dec 30th 2019 after not being able to access my original LinkedIn account linkedin.com/in/abambresphd. On Dec 29th 2019 I shared to my former (I was also victim of restrictions on that platform in 2020) Twitter account some articles I had published on my original LinkedIn account (URL1, URL2, URL3, URL4).

Fig. 2 – Screenshot of the ‘About’ section on the blocked LinkedIn profile linkedin.com/in/abambresm. 10

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

As far as I remember, one of my last posts on linkedin.com/in/abambresphd (Dec 29- 30th) had exactly the same contents as this post of mine on Twitter. A few minutes after creating the new profile linkedin.com/in/abambresm (with much fewer info, since I just wanted to be able to apply for jobs via LinkedIn), exposing in the "About" section the info described above (see Fig. 2), I was not able either to access my new LinkedIn profile. This video shows the restrictions when trying to access the aforementioned LinkedIn accounts on Dec 31st 2019 – the video is stored in a centralized platform owned by the same company that owns LinkedIn (Microsoft), so if by any instance you cannot download the video, email me and I send it over to you right away.

7. YouTube vs. flickr In this section, a comparison (as of March 26th 2020) is made between the popularity (number of views – #Views) of all my academia-related controversial videos on two centralized (i.e., controlled by a single entity) social networks – flickr and YouTube. flickr is mostly known for image-sharing but also allows short videos to be published for free, whereas YouTube is the most famous video-sharing platform and one of the most visited websites in the world to date (URL). The videos were published roughly on the same date on both platforms, and the comparison is made in Tab. 1.

Tab. 1. Popularity comparison of my academia-related controversial videos – Youtube vs. flickr. Publication #Views on Archived Video Platform Date 26/03/2020 proof YouTube 23/11/2019 477 URL Fuck The Impact Factor flickr 24/11/2019 5029 URL YouTube 25/11/2019 221 URL ¡A La Mierda! Factor Impacto flickr 26/11/2019 2589 URL YouTube 08/12/2019 168 URL When/How to Cite a Publication? flickr 09/12/2019 2875 URL YouTube 12/12/2019 115 URL Cuando/Como Citar una Publicación? flickr 13/12/2019 2461 URL

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

YouTube 02/01/2020 126 URL Fuck Peer Review flickr 03/01/2020 4299 URL YouTube 05/01/2020 28 URL A La Mierda La Revisión Por Pares flickr 06/01/2020 2118 URL YouTube 23/12/2019 96 URL Flawed Journal Impact Factor flickr 23/12/2019 2703 URL YouTube 25/12/2019 61 URL ¡ Ridículo Factor Impacto ! flickr 25/12/2019 2198 URL YouTube 10/01/2020 22 URL Teaching 'Universities' How to Assess Research flickr 11/01/2020 1739 URL YouTube 13/01/2020 23 URL Enseñar 'Universidades' a Evaluar Investigación flickr 14/01/2020 1102 URL YouTube 1337 Total #Views flickr 27113

Reducing on purpose (directly or indirectly) the number of online views (i.e., popularity) some publication actually got up to a certain instant in time is also a way of censorship, and it has been reported by many YouTube users (e.g., URL0, URL1, URL2, URL3, URL4, URL5, URL6, URL7, URL8, URL9, URL9a, URL10, URL11, URL11a, URL12, URL13, URL13a, URL14, URL15, URL15a, URL15b). I am not sure (but you can use your inner voice and take your own conclusions) about the reason why the number of views of my videos is, on flickr, 20.3 times as much as on YouTube, but I can assure you that I will never use YouTube again to promote my work (definitely a worthless company to me).

8. Solution Feeding big companie$ when there are effective and less wealthy alternatives, will jeopardize global economy and increase social inequality. I highly recommend not to think twice to start supporting alternative tech, especially when the mainstream one has failed you somehow (e.g., censorship, lack of effectiveness for your

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

purposes). Making the richest wealthier is not sustainable! Here you can check the companies and apps i´ve been blacklisting and the big tech alternatives i´ve been supporting, based on previous experiences (I can never say I won’t ever withdraw some of these convictions in the future). For further alternatives by other authors, you might want to check this website (archived here). Technologies like blockchain and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are very interesting and I definitely believe they have the potential to significantly reduce censorship and be the source of the next digital revolution.

Fig. 3. Greed, one of the 7 deadly sins, and the main cause of censorship in my opinion (source).

“Given that social networks are actually just content networks, it’s odd that Facebook is valued at over $400B while nearly all users of the platform make $0 for producing its content. If writers still make money while their publisher rises in value, shouldn’t content creators make money while the networks they share on rise in value? Is 13

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

the technological value that Facebook provides truly worth all of the creative value of the nearly 30% of humanity who post their content on it? We don’t think so. We think the future of the economy (and the world) rests with the creator, and the history of the internet is a slow march towards this inevitability” (in URL).

9. Final Remarks In this paper I tried to make the general public aware of the existence of online censorship on social networking and content-sharing platforms of any type. It was described (with proofs) what recently happened to my controversial publications / opinions once published in several popular platforms like ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, LinkedIn and YouTube. I believe this paper will be sufficient to make others consider whether they should keep using certain digital platforms and supporting the disgusting “system” that is ruling academia nowadays (I will always love academia – my ideal of it). I’ll be aware of new ways of massively and freely disseminate my innovations, ideas, and opinions throughout the web – there will always be good solutions.

References

Abambres M (2019). Fuck The Impact Factor (video), URL.

Abambres M (2019). How (Not) to Lead Academia, HAL.

Abambres M, et al. (2019). Bye Bye Peer-Reviewed Publishing, HAL.

Abambres M, Ribeiro T, Sousa A, Lantsoght E (2018). Research Counts, Not the Journal, HAL.

Abambres M (2020). Please Do Not Censor This. Why I Left ResearchGate, Zenodo, OSF, Linkedin, and Youtube, URL

Arildsen T (2016). My problem with ResearchGate, The Winnower, URL.

Baker V (2015). Letter: Academic freedom is under threat and needs urgent protection, URL.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) (2019). Say No to Online Censorship!, URL.

Oltmann SM (2019). Access to information: Freedom and Censorship, URL.

Soh D (2018). In academia, censorship and conformity have become the norm, URL.

Tenant J (2017). ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and bigger problems with scholarly publishing, URL.

UN – United Nations (2020). Universal Declaration of Human Rights – Article 19, URL.

Van Noorden R (2014). Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network, URL.