Academic Atmosphere

Hi everyone, I'm Simone and this is my first Leaflet post. I recently discovered this ecosystem and I literally fell in love with it. Each account has its own data repository that, eventually, can be even self-hosted (as I do), and it feels like magic.

Somehow, it reminds me of China's digital ecosystem, where a WeChat account is all you need for almost everything (payment, social, subscriptions to services, etc..). However, in the case of Atmosphere, your account and repository are owned by you and can be used for many different platforms.

Now, I’m a PhD student in Computer Science, an Italian one, and if you are in this field, you may know that the academic environment most of the time may seem toxic, rotten. In particular, if you dig enough into it, you'll find out that the main goal of researchers (at least in Computer Science) is to publish articles by contributing to their research field. Articles are submitted to publishers such as ACM, Elsevier, or IEEE, journals, or conferences; it doesn't really matter. At the end, you'll lose all the intellectual property on your contribution, and if your hope is to earn something from the publication, well... you are wrong; the only actor earning from it is the publisher. Universities and foundations pay millions of euros/dollars every year to buy the same publications created by the researchers paid by the university itself. Can you feel the nonsense of this system?

The question is the following: Can the atmosphere ecosystem help to fix the academic environment?

From my point of view, yes.

Maybe universities can act as Identity Providers and PDSes by storing the data repositories for their researchers. Publishers can evolve to AppViews, and researchers can use their account to directly log in to other research-related platforms such as ResearchGate.

Fixing the academic environment is not the goal of this post, it aims to start a discussion, move thoughts, and push people to have their say.

SV