Julia A. Lovett, Andrée J. Rathemacher, Diana Boukari, and Corey Lang set out to compare whether faculty members at their institution, the University of Rhode Island, deposit their work more with ResearchGate or with the institution’s own repository. To do so, the authors perform a population study and survey of over 500 faculty members. Lovett et al. found that scholars who are prone to depositing with one system will likely deposit with another. As such, Lovett et al. argue, “librarians should not be overly concerned about academic social networking sites competing with OA policies” (2). The authors do, however, suggest that further education still needs to be done about what open access policies entail, the difference between commercial and academic repositories, and the benefits of publishing open access.

Work cited

Lovett, Julia A., Andrée J. Rathemacher, Diana Boukari, and Corey Lang. 2017. “Institutional Repositories and Academic Social Networks: Competition or Complement? A Study of Open Access Policy Compliance vs. ResearchGate Participation.” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 5(1): n.p. http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2183