Title

ResearchGate vs. the Institutional Repository: Competition or Complement?

Authors

Julia Lovett, University of Rhode IslandFollow
Andrée Rathemacher, University of Rhode IslandFollow

Document Type

Article

Comments

2017 Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition, What’s Past is Prologue

Date of Original Version

11-8-2017

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Abstract

Poster, "ResearchGate vs. the Institutional Repository: Competition or Complement?," presented at the 2017 Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition, What’s Past is Prologue, on November 8, 2017 in Charleston, South Carolina.

"The popularity of ResearchGate and Academia.edu indicates that scholars want to share their work, yet to librarians tasked with implementing an Open Access policy, it can appear as though faculty are willing to invest more time uploading articles to academic social networks—often in violation of publisher policies—than in submitting articles for deposit in the institutional repository. In this session, we will present the results of a population study and survey that revealed the practices, attitudes, and motivations of faculty at the University of Rhode Island around depositing their work in ResearchGate and complying with our permissions-based Open Access Policy. While the majority of URI faculty do not use either service, we were surprised to find that faculty who share articles through ResearchGate are more likely to comply with the Open Access Policy, not less, suggesting that librarians should not view academic social networks as a threat. We discovered that a significant barrier to compliance with the OA Policy is the fact that it targets the author’s accepted manuscript version of articles and that misunderstandings about copyright leave authors confused about options for legally sharing their work. What does it mean for the Open Access movement that only a minority of faculty choose to openly share their work and comply with Open Access policies? Does the strong preference by authors for sharing final publisher PDFs provide support for calls to hasten the transition to a Gold OA publishing system? We hope attendees will engage with us in a discussion of these issues."

Additional files include version of poster for "virtual" poster session, poster description from online and printed conference programs, conference proposal as submitted, and conference proposal acceptance.