Institutional Repositories and Academic Social Networks: Competition or Complement? A Study of Open Access Policy Compliance vs. ResearchGate Participation

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe popularity of academic social networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu indicates that scholars want to share their work, yet for universities with open access (OA) policies, these sites may be competing with institutional repositories (IRs) for content. This article seeks to reveal researcher practices, attitudes, and motivations around uploading their work to ResearchGate and complying with an institutional OA Policy through a study of faculty at the University of Rhode Island (URI). METHODS We conducted a population study to examine the participation by 558 full-time URI faculty members in the OA Policy and ResearchGate followed by a survey of 728 full-time URI faculty members about their participation in the two services. DISCUSSION The majority of URI faculty do not participate in the OA Policy or use ResearchGate. Authors' primary motivations for participation are sharing their work more broadly and increasing its visibility and impact. Faculty who participate in ResearchGate are more likely to participate in the OA Policy, and vice versa. The fact that the OA Policy targets the author manuscript and not the final published article constitutes a significant barrier to participation. CONCLUSION Librarians should not view academic social networks as a threat to open access. Authors' strong preference for sharing the final, published version of their articles provides support for calls to hasten the transition to a Gold OA publishing system. Misunderstandings about the OA Policy and copyright indicate a need for librarians to conduct greater education and outreach to authors about options for legally sharing articles. Received: 01/26/2017 Accepted: 06/20/2017 Correspondence: Andrée Rathemacher, 269 Library, University Libraries, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI 02881, USA, andree@uri.edu 2. Throughout the survey, faculty reported a strong aversion to sharing the author manuscript version of their articles. This was the most significant barrier to participating in the OA Policy. This finding, if generalizable, should inform current discussions among OA advocates about the respective roles going forward of Green OA achieved through depositing author manuscripts in institutional repositories and Gold OA achieved at the point of publication. RESEARCH3. Our survey revealed a range of misunderstandings about the IR, OA policies, and copyright. For example, many respondents believe that the legality of posting one's articles in both the IR and ResearchGate depends on publisher policy and the version of the article posted. In fact, permissions-based OA policies make it legal to post author manuscripts in the IR regardless of publisher policies, and many subscriptionaccess journals prohibit depositing any version of an article to commercial sites like ResearchGate. These misunderstandings indicate a need for librarians to conduct greater education and outreach to faculty around their options for legally sharing published articles. INTRODUCTIONFrom electronic journals and repositories to soci...

Same Question, Different World: Replicating an Open Access Research Impact Study

“…29 Even where institutions mandate deposit, faculty often ignore it. 30 Nevertheless, institutional repositories provide an avenue for researchers to make both their recent and past publications freely accessible, even years after publication.…”

The changing copyright landscape in academic publishing

“…Most researchers I know never really even read or query the contracts they are given by publishers' (Anonymous, 2017a). His comments are supported by a recent study that found 'a high degree of confusion and uncertainty related to copyright' and significant misunderstanding about the restrictions on depositing work in SCNs (Lovett, Rathemacher, Boukai, & Lang, 2017). There is similar confusion about the broader issue of sharing data that underpins published research as well as about intellectual property in general (Anonymous, 2016;Lyubetskaya, 2017;Soetendorp, Haberman, & Smith, 2016).…”

“…Many researchers emphasize the importance of having the freedom to circulate work amongst colleagues as part of the process of scholarly debate, including uploading work to SCNs (Dylla, 2016;Van Noorden, 2014 researchgate.net/). Studies suggest as many as 50-60% of academics may be using ResearchGate to load their own publications, access work by colleagues, or facilitate collaboration (Borrego, 2017;Harseim & Goodey, 2017;Lovett et al, 2017;Van Noorden, 2014). On occasion, this desire of researchers to share work with colleagues can lead authors to contravene the terms of their agreements with publishers, which limit the sharing of their work.…”

“…This still leaves the great majority of articles published through conventional subscription-based channels and presumably, in many cases, with standard assignment agreements. As the STM figures suggest, authors' use of institutional repositories to archive their publications also remains low (Borrego, 2017;Lovett et al, 2017;Poynder, 2016).…”

Österreichische Repositorien in OpenDOAR und re3data.org: Entwicklung und Status von Infrastrukturen für Green Open Access und Forschungsdaten

“…5 Zu den OSIS zählt selbstverständlich auch ein Großteil der mittlerweile sehr vielfältigen Landschaft an Repositorien, die bei der Etablierung eines offenen wissenschaftlichen Kommunikationssystems als zentrale Infrastrukturen dienen sollten. 6 Wenn sie dies nicht ohnehin bereits tun, werden auch österreichische Forschungseinrichtungen in naher Zukunft dazu aufgefordert sein, sich an der GO FAIR Initiative 7 zu beteiligen und die von ihnen betriebenen elektronischen Infrastrukturen -allen voran die Repositorien -zu einem integralen Bestandteil der angestrebten European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) 8 werden zu lassen.…”