I just found Academia.edu since I’m looking for an academic social network that would be the equivalent of GitHub in its spirit of openness and freedom. Academia.edu seemed to me like the go-to choice at first because of its supposed stance on open access for academic research.

I realized there's a strong “for-profit” sentiment to Academia.edu. It’s kinda appalling for someone who comes with background of free and open source software from Debian and Wikipedia. I can hardly trust a platform that is purely driven by profit. Aside from Academia.edu’s proprietary approach, all the bloat on their platform sometimes feels like WordPress, or just another typical sluggish web app with loads of JavaScript.

I wouldn’t blame Academia.edu for selling a premium subscription, since both GitHub and GitLab have theirs too, but GitHub’s subscription is not a must-have necessity for developers to contribute and maintain effectively projects, and attract as much attention and popularity as you could possibly imagine. GitHub wants its users to succeed and grow with the platform, so they provide maximum freedom and empowerment to do almost whatever we desire, the platform doesn’t hold us hostages or extorts us.

Academia.edu’s interpretation of “your own website” seemed to me like a complete surfeit when I first saw it today. I’d rather go and launch my own custom-made, auto-generated, static front-page on GitHub for free instead. But even if I were too lazy to generate a trivial static webpage with Lua or another scripting language, I’d rather point people at my LinkedIn profile. Them using it as a selling point seemed to me as if they’re trying to sell me something I don’t need while totally underestimating me.

Edit. I just deleted my account on Academia.edu. Apparently people around the web (especially on Quora) have complained quite harshly criticizing the platform on lack of credibility (such as claiming having 100m "Academics" registered), and on charging users fees on false pretense by promising them information on citations that then turn out to be unrelated due to confusion of similar names/abbreviations. This is exactly why I said I can't trust such platforms.

One of our astute and kindly members here on LQN made me aware of Disapora which I researched, found was Open, largely Linux-based and very secure AND has a hashtag option so you can filter for what subjects interest you as well as a more open "Public" area. It's quite good. It is the only open ended forum to which I subscribe. All of the others are specific having to do with Music, Electronics, and Physics. I am extremely fond of LQN for having a bit of both as well as truly adult moderation. Some are rather draconian. Diaspora is entirely open in terms of zero censorship, so if it sounds good to you, be aware going in some hashtag preferences are more like the "Wild West" days of the Interwebz.

It's necessary to have reasonable policies to protect free speech on a platform to allow intellectual independence and free thinking. With that said, I want to clarify what I meant by "openness" in my original post.

I consider a platform that permits everyone to access and study its wealth of information without registration, and to participate by registration alone without any additional requirements (such as geographic region, paid subscription, or occupational qualification) to be an open platform within the context of this thread. Wikipedia, StackExchange, Quora, GitHub, LinuxQuestions are examples of what I consider open platforms.

ResearchGate is an example of a great platform for academic social networking, however only graduate researchers can participate in this platform, but not everyone who is interested in academic research is (yet) a researcher, just as you wouldn't expect GitHub to require everyone to be a qualified software engineer in order to contribute to free software, or even open an issue to report a bug.

Ideally I'm looking for a platform that is specifically adapted for academic use, one that has an advanced tracker for citations, and a well-structured classification of different fields and sub-fields within every discipline. I think at this point I'm nearly convinced there isn't such platform besides ResearchGate, which I have to wait for a couple of years. Last thought on censorship: I loathe censorship, but since I'm majoring in mathematics, who can I offend? :D

At this point in time, in this current era, with the current mindsets...
... I would recommend nothing I actually enjoy.

Edit:
That said, library genesis is great source for academic papers and all that good stuff (aka, more than just papers.).
I can recommend that one because it's always under fire and has monkeys sitting on its back, anyway.
I'm not sure if I should straight up link it, though.

Well David that's a tough combo since complete openness ie - no registration required (assuming I understood you) - is inherently more difficult to keep secure. You could browse a bit at physicsforums.com which is extremely academic and despite the name, is not at all limited to Physics. There is a large sub-section devoted to Mathematics which is further subdivided into areas of interest eg: more than one for just computing/coding application. Mathematics, is, after all literally the language of Science as I'm sure you well know, so any truly scientific forum will have at least some areas of interest to "linguists".

I am a paid subscriber to arxiv.org and a handful of other science specific forums and despite some chagrin at the need to pay up front, most have been well worth it both for the access to serious data as well as the strong security.

Take a look at the attached screenie to see if this interests you or click the link to the full size one.

https://i.imgur.com/LJHErg6.jpg

I've been a registered member so long now I've forgotten how much is accessible without registering so if it looks interesting to you then try the site to see for yourself both the caliber of people and data as well as how much is allowed sans registration. You may agree after a sampling that registration is well worth any concerns. If not let me wish you well in your field. It's better than real estate since the space is unlimited and like the Universe, expanding at an accelerating rate.

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