Putting conference papers on Academia or ResearchGate

[adel9216]

Hello, what is the « policy » for putting academic conference papers online on ResearchGate or Academia ? Do I just put the abstract or the entire paper/powerpoint presentation ?

[Katrina Gulliver]

Don't know for researchgate. But Academia has no "policy"; there's nothing stopping you putting up whatever you like. I have found it useful in the past to put up a draft and get comments.

[polly_mer]

What is typical in your fields?  Look through profiles of people you respect and do likewise.

What are the rules of the conference?  I know of conferences where the published papers are copyrighted and there are rules about what form can be posted outside the proceedings.

What are the rules of your employer or funder?  Sometimes, there are rules about additional permissions or recommended outlets.

Why do you want to post and what materials best help you achieve that goal?  An abstract work to have people contact you to start interactions.  A paper may be cited in literature reviews.

[Hibush]

ResearchGate really encourages authors to put full texts on their sites. On the other hand, copyright owners don't want that.

What you do matters a lot. My older publications are found by other researchers more often through RG than any other route. I want to encourage that discovery!  But I also want to support the venue where I published that work. Therefore, I upload a document as the "full text" on RG that has a link to the original publication. I pay to have my work open access, so those who follow the link don't hit a paywall.

If your conference paper is in a public format at the conference site, I encourage you to do something similar.   

[adel9216]

What is typical in your fields?  Look through profiles of people you respect and do likewise.

What are the rules of the conference?  I know of conferences where the published papers are copyrighted and there are rules about what form can be posted outside the proceedings.

What are the rules of your employer or funder?  Sometimes, there are rules about additional permissions or recommended outlets.

Why do you want to post and what materials best help you achieve that goal?  An abstract work to have people contact you to start interactions.  A paper may be cited in literature reviews.

I want to do that to make my work visible and to foster potential collaborations with others scholars and researchers.

[polly_mer]

What is typical in your fields?  Look through profiles of people you respect and do likewise.

What are the rules of the conference?  I know of conferences where the published papers are copyrighted and there are rules about what form can be posted outside the proceedings.

What are the rules of your employer or funder?  Sometimes, there are rules about additional permissions or recommended outlets.

Why do you want to post and what materials best help you achieve that goal?  An abstract work to have people contact you to start interactions.  A paper may be cited in literature reviews.

I want to do that to make my work visible and to foster potential collaborations with others scholars and researchers.

Do people in your field use Researchgate that way over conference attendance or journals?

For more than a decade, Researchgate was really going to change science.  It has not done so in fields that matter to me.  The advice to newcomers in those fields is to use the standard outlets instead of the hype.

Check with your advisor on what the best visibility is for your work for your goal.

[Parasaurolophus]

I post penultimate drafts of my published papers to my disciplinary repository, and occasionally I get around to posting the links to those to academia. But not conference papers or other unpublished stuff.

[Hibush]

Do people in your field use Researchgate that way over conference attendance or journals?

For more than a decade, Researchgate was really going to change science.  It has not done so in fields that matter to me.  The advice to newcomers in those fields is to use the standard outlets instead of the hype.

Check with your advisor on what the best visibility is for your work for your goal.

I realize your question was for Adel, but I can address a couple of the issues from the perspective of biology.

I'd compare ResearchGate to a better version on Google Scholar. It is not an alternative to academic journals.

A clear cultural change in the last few years: if you want your research to be visible, you have to publicize it. Shying away from using obvious publicity outlets constitutes hiding, so following old-fashioned advice to be demure can be professionally harmful.

Publish in excellent journals. Then make sure the work is listed on ResearchGate. Tweet about the article. Get quoted in the Wall Street Journal/Huffpo. This behavior is pretty much the minimum expectation now.

Regarding conference proceedings: if the conference has put the list of papers online, ResearchGate will find them and add the listing to your profile automatically. (Google Scholar seems good at that also.) Your decision is whether to add an explicit link to the proceedings or to upload a version of the paper.

[Faith786]

ResearchGate really encourages authors to put full texts on their sites. On the other hand, copyright owners don't want that.

What you do matters a lot. My older publications are found by other researchers more often through RG than any other route. I want to encourage that discovery!  But I also want to support the venue where I published that work. Therefore, I upload a document as the "full text" on RG that has a link to the original publication. I pay to have my work open access, so those who follow the link don't hit a paywall.

If your conference paper is in a public format at the conference site, I encourage you to do something similar.

I like open access for this reason, too, but sometimes there are very high costs associated with open access and I noticed many people are against APCs and it rubs them the wrong way. I actually don't mind the APCs as long as the journal is reputable (and is not among the scary predatory one), has a decent impact factor, and indexed or has content aggregators in legit places.

[Hibush]

ResearchGate really encourages authors to put full texts on their sites. On the other hand, copyright owners don't want that.

What you do matters a lot. My older publications are found by other researchers more often through RG than any other route. I want to encourage that discovery!  But I also want to support the venue where I published that work. Therefore, I upload a document as the "full text" on RG that has a link to the original publication. I pay to have my work open access, so those who follow the link don't hit a paywall.

If your conference paper is in a public format at the conference site, I encourage you to do something similar.

I like open access for this reason, too, but sometimes there are very high costs associated with open access and I noticed many people are against APCs and it rubs them the wrong way. I actually don't mind the APCs as long as the journal is reputable (and is not among the scary predatory one), has a decent impact factor, and indexed or has content aggregators in legit places.

Open-access, APCs and quality are often conflated by people who are not keeping up with the changes in publishing. While there are some associations, they are independent characteristics. You have to evaluate quality on the basis of quality factors (as you do). That will impress people who understand quality scholarship; I wouldn't worry about the ones who dismiss that for irrelevant reasons.

[polly_mer]

A clear cultural change in the last few years: if you want your research to be visible, you have to publicize it. Shying away from using obvious publicity outlets constitutes hiding, so following old-fashioned advice to be demure can be professionally harmful.

Publish in excellent journals. Then make sure the work is listed on ResearchGate. Tweet about the article. Get quoted in the Wall Street Journal/Huffpo. This behavior is pretty much the minimum expectation now.

Interesting because that's not what I'm seeing for the research areas about which I care.  The education folks are on social media because that's where the discussion is.  Tweeting works great to get included in those groups.

However, for my science research, the discussion is all at conferences and workshops.  I agree that merely publishing and being demure doesn't work, but the socializing of the results is at conferences and workshops.  One presents at the conference and then networks into the invitations to the very limited attendance workshops.  The idea that one publishes a paper and then somehow gets noticed by people who matter through social media posts is very bad advice.  Instead, one must be networking at the open-to-all conferences to get included into the invitation-only workshops.

Our institution, like many research places, will help place articles in the mass media including submitting video clips that act like interviews.  We have publicists who put good stuff in all kinds of social media.  The idea that the scientist should be wasting their time doing the tweeting to capture the attention of other scientists is strongly discouraged.  One works with the media folks who will make sure the tidbit is polished and gets into the right outlets.  However, that's much more about raising the awareness of what a fabulous institution we are so that people should fund us more than promoting individual junior folks for their own careers.  The net effect, though, is some junior people here get mass media attention by doing something great.

Thus, the question to adel remains what is standard in her field and is she doing the things that will get her noticed?  I observe that Hibush is not suggesting a post to Researchgate and then calling it a day.

[Puget]

In my experience (and again, field dependent as always), Research Gate is much more like Google Scholar as mentioned by another poster, not really like social media. I don't interact with people there and no one really comments on papers, but it is a way to make them available to those who have poor access through their libraries (most requests I get are from those in developing countries) -- I do that by uploading a private copy so I don't violate copyright unless it is already OA. People can then press the "request full text" button to ask for it and it just takes a few clicks for me to share it.

To the original question, I only post published papers.