ResearchGate vs. the Institutional Repository: Competition or Complement?

Albert Sherman Center Auditorium, AS2.2102

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 lightning talk, 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.