Why Share Your Work in Open Access Repositories?

In the print paradigm, scholars distributed their research through formal publications such as journals.  Today, you can also upload your work to one or more open access repositories.  This means anyone who is interested can access your research.  Here are some reasons this can be beneficial to you:

• Increased readership and "altmetrics" can be evidence of impact for tenure and promotion.
• Open access research results are beneficial to the global research community, facilitating scientific reproducibility.
• Institutional repositories are often "crawled" by Google Scholar and other search engines, meaning your research will be more discoverable.
• Complying with funder requirements to upload to specific repositories increases your chances of getting more grants.
• Repositories are usually managed by libraries, government agencies, and other non-profits.  These organizations are committed to preserving the scholarly record and making it available to future generations.

Repositories vs. Academic Social Networks

You may notice that ResearchGate and Academia.edu are not listed as repositories.  You can find more information about them in the Network & Promote tab.  These products are created by privately-held companies without a commitment to long term preservation, content curation, or open access.  They are not, strictly speaking, "open access repositories," and you shouldn't rely on them to preserve your content.  You can certainly use them to promote your content to others in the network-- just be sure to upload to an open access repository as well!

Different Kinds of Repositories