Welcome to Day 3 of the Research Impact Challenge!
Today we’ll explore how scholarly digital repositories can help you make all kinds of work—from article pre-prints to slide decks to syllabi—easier to preserve, share, discover, and cite.
Have you ever shared your published articles or other forms of scholarly work with colleagues over social media or through email, or posted them to your personal website? Using a digital repository can make the common activity of exchanging work with colleagues easier and more stable.
Not all repositories behave exactly the same way, but as a general rule, by depositing work in a repository, you’ll get:
- A stable URL for the work that you can share with others or post to social media, your personal website, your CV, and beyond. This stable URL makes it easier for others to cite your work. You also won’t have to worry about broken links, or about migrating and re-posting your work to a new web page if you move to a new institution, or if your website moves to a new platform.
- Indexing by Google and Google Scholar, which makes your work more discoverable by others.
- Some form of feedback (aka metrics you can use in your promotion and tenure packet, grant applications, job applications) about how your work is being used: how many views it has received, download counts, shares, etc.
There are many different scholarly repositories. Often, they focus on specific disciplines, such as mathematics or biology; or communities, such as members of the Modern Language Association or University of Maine faculty, staff, and students.
Today's Challenge:
Choose a repository from the following list (or a different one that you know) and take some time to explore it. Find one item of interest in the repository that you'd like to read, use in your research or teaching, or share with colleagues.
Bonus Challenge:
Create an account and deposit a piece of your work in an appropriate repository!
A Selection of Key Scholarly Repositories:
ArXiv.org
- Who can deposit: any registered member of the Humanities Commons network, including members of AJS Commons, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Commons, and Modern Language Association Commons
- What you can deposit: “Not just articles and monographs: Upload your course materials, white papers, conference papers, code, digital projects—these can have an impact too!”
- More information/FAQ
- Search, browse, and explore
Interested in exploring other repositories? Consider this wide range of repositories by discipline.
What next?
- Want to deposit in UMaine's DigitalCommons open access repository, but don’t know where to begin? Or, perhaps you'd like a refresher? Create an account (or access your existing account). Questions? Contact Library Specialist Kimberly Sawtelle, or your library liaison. We're happy to help!
- Check usage/download statistics for anything you’ve deposited in a repository to gather information about the kind of attention your work is receiving - you can include this information in your end-of-year reports, grant applications, CV, etc.
- Keep an eye out for any alerts from Google Scholar indicating that something you deposited was indexed and added to your Google Scholar profile.
Already have an account with UMaine's DigitalCommons, or another repository in your field?
Take this opportunity to review your account for accuracy, check for missing publications, and add nontraditional works (e.g., a poster, syllabus, thesis, slide deck, conference talk, or patent).
Learn more:
- When depositing your scholarly work in a repository (this goes for sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu as well), it's important to understand how copyright applies to your publications. The SHERPA/RoMEO database contains information about specific publisher policies regarding the version(s) of your work that you can post in a repository (pre-print, post-print, publisher's PDF version). Need help tracking down publisher permissions for your work? Contact your library liaison!
- Repositories are one way to make scholarly content freely available online. And, research suggests that the more open your scholarship is, the more likely it is to be found, read, and cited. Learn more about Open Access in this library guide.
Preparing for your next challenge:
Congratulations! You’ve completed today's challenge! Join us tomorrow when we'll take an inventory of our academic social media use in order to prioritize and make strategic decisions about where to spend time and effort in the coming year.
