Institutional repositories versus ResearchGate: The depositing habits of Spanish researchers

Abstract

Despite the increase in the number of institutional repositories worldwide, most of them seem underpopulated. At the same time, scientists are apparently willing to share copies of their publications on academic social networking sites. This paper compares the availability of the scholarly output in the institutional repositories of 13 top Spanish universities and in ResearchGate (RG). Results show that just 11.1% of the articles published in 2014 by researchers at these universities were available in their institutional repository in the first quarter of 2016. However, most of the articles that were not available in institutional repositories (84.5%) were published in journals that allow the deposit of the article in some form. In contrast, 54.8% of the articles were available in full text on RG. When authors who had uploaded copies of their articles to RG but not to their institutional repository were asked about their reasons, most replies focused on two issues: ignorance about the existence or operation of the institutional repository and awareness of the advantages offered by RG.A study designed to measure the degree of compliance with a Spanish government OA mandate (Borrego, 2016) observed

Institutional Repositories and Academic Social Networks: Competition or Complement? A Study of Open Access Policy Compliance vs. ResearchGate Participation

“…None of the major publishers allows sharing of the final published version of record on commercial sites like ResearchGate, unless, of course, the article was published under a CC-BY license. Yet the publisher's PDF is the version that 81.8% of our survey respondents reported posting on ResearchGate, confirming the findings of other recent studies (Borrego, 2017;Jamali, 2017;Laakso et al, 2017;Tenopir et al, 2016). Even some publishers that allow authors to post accepted manuscripts on non-commercial sites including IRs and personal websites often explicitly prohibit or limit posting on commercial sites like ResearchGate (American Association for the Advancement of Science, n. Finally, our statistical analysis of the survey results, in which contributing full-texts to ResearchGate and compliance with the OA Policy were positively correlated, shows that faculty are not using ResearchGate to the exclusion of the institutional repository.…”

“…Echoing the recent findings of Tenopir et al (2016) and Borrego (2017), a significant theme throughout our survey results was authors' preference for sharing the final published versions of their articles and their dislike for sharing their peer-reviewed manuscripts, the version uploaded to the IR as specified by the OA Policy. Reasons for their dislike of the manuscript version (see Table 6) included a preference for the final published version of record; not wanting multiple versions of the same work to be available; not wanting a version with potential errors and typos to be made publicly available; a belief that the manuscript version was often messy, potentially leading to misunderstandings by readers; the fact that the manuscript version does not share the pagination of the final version, making it difficult to cite; not having ready access to the final manuscript version, especially when not the corresponding author; and the time and effort it takes to reassemble the manuscript version into a coherent whole, for example re-integrating figures and tables into the text.…”

“…ResearchGate scored higher than the OA Policy on both of these factors. In addition, a number of comments by researchers who had contributed to ResearchGate but had not complied with the Policy indicated that they believe ResearchGate has a wider audience than the institutional repository, a finding identical to that of Borrego (2017). This perception most likely results from a lack of awareness among respondents that the IR reaches a wide audience, but it also reflects the differing nature of the two services.…”

“…With the exception of Laakso et al (2017) and Borrego (2017), there does not appear to be any published literature that compares the degree to which authors upload their article full-texts to ResearchGate and self-archive their papers in an institutional repository, and no article to our knowledge has compared authors' posting of articles to academic social networks with their compliance with institutional OA policies. Thus, it is our hope that this article will contribute new insights to the literature.…”

“Is it like academia.edu?”: Faculty perceptions and usage of academic social networking sites and implications for librarians and institutional repositories

“…Yet the opportunities for librarian involvement go beyond these parameters. As Borrego (2017) discovered in a research study comparing the rates of deposit of scientific publications by researchers in ResearchGate versus IRs, academics more readily post their work to an ASNS (54.8%) than to their own IR (11.1%), often due to unawareness of the IR and its benefits (p. 1). This finding is significant for academic librarians who seek to engage their faculty in fruitful dialogue about the value of library-led IRs.…”