INTRODUCTIONThe popularity of academic social networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu indicates that scholars want to share their work, yet for universities with open access (OA) policies, these sites may be competing with institutional repositories (IRs) for content. This article seeks to reveal researcher practices, attitudes, and motivations around uploading their work to ResearchGate and complying with an institutional OA Policy through a study of faculty at the University of Rhode Island (URI). METHODS We conducted a population study to examine the participation by 558 full-time URI faculty members in the OA Policy and ResearchGate followed by a survey of 728 full-time URI faculty members about their participation in the two services. DISCUSSION The majority of URI faculty do not participate in the OA Policy or use ResearchGate. Authors' primary motivations for participation are sharing their work more broadly and increasing its visibility and impact. Faculty who participate in ResearchGate are more likely to participate in the OA Policy, and vice versa. The fact that the OA Policy targets the author manuscript and not the final published article constitutes a significant barrier to participation. CONCLUSION Librarians should not view academic social networks as a threat to open access. Authors' strong preference for sharing the final, published version of their articles provides support for calls to hasten the transition to a Gold OA publishing system. Misunderstandings about the OA Policy and copyright indicate a need for librarians to conduct greater education and outreach to authors about options for legally sharing articles. Received: 01/26/2017 Accepted: 06/20/2017 Correspondence: Andrée Rathemacher, 269 Library, University Libraries, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI 02881, USA, andree@uri.edu 2. Throughout the survey, faculty reported a strong aversion to sharing the author manuscript version of their articles. This was the most significant barrier to participating in the OA Policy. This finding, if generalizable, should inform current discussions among OA advocates about the respective roles going forward of Green OA achieved through depositing author manuscripts in institutional repositories and Gold OA achieved at the point of publication. RESEARCH3. Our survey revealed a range of misunderstandings about the IR, OA policies, and copyright. For example, many respondents believe that the legality of posting one's articles in both the IR and ResearchGate depends on publisher policy and the version of the article posted. In fact, permissions-based OA policies make it legal to post author manuscripts in the IR regardless of publisher policies, and many subscriptionaccess journals prohibit depositing any version of an article to commercial sites like ResearchGate. These misunderstandings indicate a need for librarians to conduct greater education and outreach to faculty around their options for legally sharing published articles. INTRODUCTIONFrom electronic journals and repositories to soci...
Topics in serials acquisitions dominate the column, including reports on altmetrics, cost per use, and demand-driven acquisitions; scholarly communications and the use of subscriptions agents; but also ERMS, access, and knowledgebases.
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The University of Rhode Island (URI) University Libraries publishes five active open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals on our DigitalCommons@URI platform. Our journal publishing program has grown slowly but steadily over the last decade, with new services added incrementally as needed. In early 2019, we conducted three focus group interviews with nine editors and assistants representing all of the journals on our platform in order to assess our journal publishing efforts. We asked editors to identify the successes, challenges, and unmet needs that they have encountered in the publishing process and what resources they have found to support their journals outside of library offerings. We highlight what we learned from our editors: what they value, what they need, and what they want from library publishing services. We also outline our plans going forward to facilitate ongoing conversations among editors and to find creative solutions to help them with their biggest challenges.
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