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Browsing Library by Subject "Academia.edu"

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    Canadian and South African scholars' use of institutional repositories, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu
    (The Partnership. Provincial and Territorial Library Association of Canada, 2018) Swanepoel, Marinus; Scott, David R.
    Since their initial development in the early 2000s, institutional repositories (IRs) have proliferated around the globe. Due to low faculty participation, however, content recruitment has often posed a significant challenge for librarians and others promoting their use. Through the last decade, academic social networks (ASNs), such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, have become popular among scholars as a means to communicate with each other and share their research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixty scholars at six universities in Canada and South Africa to explore their views and practices pertaining to IRs and ASNs. Interviews were transcribed and coded to elucidate trends and themes in the data. The study found that few participants were active supporters of their local IRs. Lack of awareness, time limitations, and concerns regarding copyright remain some of the main obstacles to increased faculty participation. Conversely, more than half of the interviewees were active users of either ResearchGate or Academia.edu. These users valued ASNs both as a means of sharing their work and as tools facilitating connections with their colleagues internationally. Though IRs need not compete with these networks, proponents of open access repositories should be prepared to explain to faculty why they should consider having their research made accessible in a repository though they may already actively share their work through ResearchGate or Academia.edu. Significantly, both ASNs and IRs were more popular among South African than Canadian researchers. It is hoped that the results of the study will be helpful in informing the understanding and decisions of librarians and others working to develop and promote IRs and green open access more broadly.
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    Whose research is it anyway? Academic social networks versus institutional repositories
    (Pacific University Libraries, 2019) Eva, Nicole; Wiebe, Tara A.
    INTRODUCTION Looking for ways to increase deposits into their institutional repository (IR), researchers at one institution started to mine academic social networks (ASNs) (namely, ResearchGate and Academia.edu) to discover which researchers might already be predisposed to providing open access to their work. METHODS Researchers compared the numbers of institutionally affiliated faculty members appearing in the ASNs to those appearing in their institutional repositories. They also looked at how these numbers compared to overall faculty numbers. RESULTS Faculty were much more likely to have deposited their work in an ASN than in the IR. However, the number of researchers who deposited in both the IR and at least one ASN exceeded that of those who deposited their research solely in an ASN. Unexpected findings occurred as well, such as numerous false or unverified accounts claiming affiliation with the institution. ResearchGate was found to be the favored ASN at this particular institution. DISCUSSION The results of this study confirm earlier studies’ findings indicating that those researchers who are willing to make their research open access are more disposed to do so over multiple channels, showing that those who already self-archive elsewhere are prime targets for inclusion in the IR. CONCLUSION Rather than seeing ASNs as a threat to IRs, they may be seen as a potential site of identifying likely contributors to the IR.