On ResearchGate and IRs: C-EBLIP Journal Club, October 5, 2017

By DeDe Dawson
Science & Scholarly Communication Librarian, University of Saskatchewan

The C-EBLIP Journal Club article for October 5, 2017 was:

Lovett, J. A., Rathemacher, A. J., Boukari, D., & Lang, C. (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(General Issue), eP2131. https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2183

I chose this article because it discusses two things that have been on my mind a lot lately: IRs & academic social networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu. I am thinking about IRs a lot because I’m helping with the planning and pilots of the University of Saskatchewan’s newly rebranded IR: HARVEST (still on a test site so I won’t link to it here). And about academic social networks because ResearchGate (RG) has been in the news so much recently.

It is well known that researchers often post copies of their articles on RG in violation of the copyright terms that they agreed to with the publisher. Another recent article documents this. Well, it looks like RG is finally being forced by publishers to take down these articles that are in violation – and are even removing some that are not. As librarians have been trying to tell their patrons for years: RG is not an open access repository.

So, this article by Lovett et al. from the University of Rhode Island is timely. The authors set out to understand researchers’ practices, attitudes, and motivations around sharing their articles in RG and in their IR in compliance with the university’s Open Access Policy. Lovett et al. admit that they expected to find RG to be in competition with their IR, but interestingly “Faculty who participate in ResearchGate are more likely to participate in the OA Policy, and vice versa” (Lovett et al., 2017, p1).

The group at our journal club meeting also thought this finding interesting. One member pointed out that faculty have such limited time – why would they archive papers in more than one site? And it wouldn’t be surprising if the site they chose was RG due to its ease of use. This does not seem to be the case though (in this study at least). It seems those researchers committed to sharing their articles openly will invest the time in doing this in multiple locations. It is worth noting though that most of the faculty (70.6%) in the study didn’t use RG or the IR!

So, RG and the IR are not competitors. But faculty do still seem to prefer RG. Ease of use has already been mentioned, but we also thought that it fit with the mobility of faculty too. Researchers are always moving to new institutions, so may not feel compelled to invest time in their current institution’s IR. The biggest barrier however, appears to be the fact that IRs actually respect and comply with copyright law. This means that usually authors cannot upload the final version of record of their articles into the IR. This study confirmed once again that many faculty are averse to posting other versions of their works.

The other finding that caught our attention was that Full Professors are more active than lower ranked colleagues on both RG and the OA Policy/IR! This does not fit with what we hear about early career researchers (ECRs) being more willing to experiment with new means of scholarly communications. Our group speculated that senior faculty are secure in their positions and ECRs are more tentative about rocking the boat. It is also likely that senior faculty also have more administrative support to actually do the work of uploading. This second insight rings most true to me…

On the concluding page of the article Lovett et al. (2017) state: “…librarians should prioritize recruiting more faculty to share their work in general and should not see academic social networking as a threat to open access” (p.27).

Amen.

This article gives the views of the author and not necessarily the views the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.

Carrots & Sticks: Encouraging self-archiving in an IR. C-EBLIP Journal Club, Mar 31, 2016

by Shannon Lucky
IT Librarian
University Library, University of Saskatchewan

Article: Betz, S., & Hall, R. (2015). Self-Archiving with Ease in an Institutional Repository: Microinteractions and the User Experience. Information Technology and Libraries, 34(3), 43–58. http://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v34i3.5900

One of the things I love about the C-EBLIP journal club is the ease of having one of my colleagues pick out an interesting article from their area of specialization so I can poke my head into their world for an hour and see what ideas they are wrestling with. As an IT librarian, picking an article creates some anxiety because systems and technology aren’t always that accessible (or interesting) for a diverse audience. I was happy to see Sonya Betz and Robyn Hall’s article pop up on a library tech listserv as it was a great fit for our group.

The University Library currently doesn’t have an institutional repository (IR) for the entire campus, but we do have a DSpace eCommons repository for research by UofS librarians. Because we have all deposited our own work into eCommons our conversation started with a unanimous (good natured) rant about how hard it is to do self-archiving. It is time-consuming and the technology was deemed to be frustrating and unsatisfying. Like other tedious institutional reporting systems, we assumed this was the only way. As one member put it, “I didn’t know we could expect better”.

While we talked about how frustrating the process could be, we also wondered just how much effort, time, and money should be invested in improving a system that we all have to use, but that our library users will never see. When do we make the call that something is good enough and we, or our fellow faculty, can suck it up and figure it out or ask for help? One of my favourite suggestions was that a “good enough” scenario would have the user feeling “the absence of anger”. Apparently the bar is quite low. Betz and Hall talk about some of the barriers to self-archiving but don’t ask why, when contributing to IRs is so difficult, many academics voluntarily submit their work to sites like academia.edu and ResearchGate – what is it they are doing right that we could learn from?

This led to a discussion about what libraries could do to encourage faculty, both within and outside the library, to deposit in an IR. We saw two routes: the carrot and the stick.

1024px-Carrot_and_stick_motivation svg

Carrots:
• Link academic reporting systems together to cut down on the number of places this information needs to be input (e.g. have citations from the IR export to formatted CVs, link ORCHID accounts with IR entries for authority control and better exposure, etc.)
• Group scholarly output for colleges, departments, or research groups together in the IR to show the collective impact of their work
• Gamify the submission process with progress bars, badges, and the ability to level up you scholarly work

Sticks:
• Money. Canada Council requires submission to an IR as a part of their funding model
• Librarians armed with actual sticks going office to office “persuading” scholars to deposit their research

We agreed that libraries don’t wield an effective stick in this scenario. Research services, colleges, and departments have to be the ones to put on the pressure to deposit. Librarians can help make that happen and (hopefully) make it as pain-free as possible.

This article gives the views of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of the Centre for Evidence Based Library and Information Practice or the University Library, University of Saskatchewan.