Researcher Support Library Services: Promoting Research

ResearchGate and Academia.edu

ResearchGate and Academia.edu are social networking platforms whose primary aim is to connect researchers with common interests. Users create profiles on these services, and are then encouraged to list their publications and other scholarly activities, upload copies of manuscripts they’ve authored, and build connections with scholars they work or co-author with. Essentially these services provide a Facebook or LinkedIn experience for the research community.

Both services are commercial companies. Although Academia.edu has a “.edu” URL, it isn’t run by a higher education institution. The domain name was registered before the rules that would now prohibit this use went into effect.

Deposit of content

If you have signed a Copyright Transfer Agreement, you will most likely no longer own the published version of the article (Version of Record) and publishers tend to forbid posting paywalled articles to these sites.  If you do so, you will breaking copyright law.

So, how do I know what I can deposit on these sites?

You can usually post the Accepted Manuscript subject to any embargo; check publisher policies via Sherpa Romeo. Look up your journal and check the embargo under 'Publisher Policy' to find out how long after publication you need to wait. Note that the Accepted Manuscript is not the published version!

You can also email openresearch@plymouth.ac.uk for advice on whether or not you can add a document to sites such as ResearchGate. 

Open access repositories, interoperability & profit

Open access repositories such as PEARL or subject repositories e.g. NERC's NORA, aim to make scholarly outputs as widely available as possible and to ensure long-term preservation of these outputs.  Repositories use open metadata schema to enable free flow of data across various services such as ORCiD, funder platforms etc. enabling the Green Accepted Manuscript versions to be found via Web of Science searches, Google Scholar and other OA finder tools such as Kopernio & Unpaywall.

Academia.edu and ResearchGate are commercial entities and do not allow data to be exported once added unless for their own benefit; e.g. Academia.edu now has a Premium subscription fee which charges users to access work you may have uploaded for free.

Academia.edu and ResearchGate are also not repositories, and uploading a pre-print or accepted manuscript to these sites does not meet the criteria for UoP or REF Open Access policies.

Where should I put my efforts?

ResearchGate and Academia.edu might be valuable when trying to find others in your field conducting related research and for promoting yourself. We would recommend adding your ORCiD ID to these profiles so that a current list of publications is easily available (minimising manual updates), and either links to the PEARL version or uploading Accepted Manuscripts subject to any embargo as per publisher policy.

Depositing your Accepted Manuscript in PEARL

Creating an ORCiD ID

Some content re-used from the University of California Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Article originally available at http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/.

Open Peer Review and Publons

What is Open Peer Review?

The idea of open peer review is to bring more transparency, inclusivity and accountability to the academic peer review process by disclosing the names of the reviewers to the author. These names may also be made publicly available. 'Open Peer Review' is an umbrella term which covers several different models for peer review.

[More content coming soon]

"What is Kudos? A brief introduction", March 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoQE4exULhM

There are more things you can do to promote your research and increase attribution and impact:

Online Identifiers for Author Attribution

Creating an accessible online presence for your research outputs which goes hand in hand with increased visibility. Identifiers connect publications, authors, institution & funders to minimise manual update and auto-populate profiles, saving authors time.

You can visit our guidance on Online Identifiers to find advice on cultivating and keeping online presence up-to-date on databases such as ORCID, Scopus and Web of Science.