Social networking for researchers

ResearchGate

Get citations

Get hired

Get advice from fellow experts

Promoting your work

Promoting your work (2)

Promoting your work (3)

Promoting your work (4)

ResearchGate Terms and Conditions

4. Users may only request storage of such information that they may legally store and publish. Users must not request to store any information that infringes any third party's copyright, trademarks, other intellectual property rights or any other rights.
5. Users indemnify the Provider from any claims raised by third parties in reference to any information that is stored on request of the respective User. The indemnification covers all adequate expenditures, including court and lawyer fees.

ResearchGate: Pros

• Researcher profile/promotion
• Q&A forums
• Job hunting
• Literature awareness service

ResearchGate: Cons

• Unethical document sharing
• Co-opted self-serving altmetrics
• Spammy

Similar to ResearchGate

Academia.edu

• 15M members, vs. RG's 5M
• Open to anyone over 13, vs. RG's university email address requirement
• Like RG, terms of use place burden on users

Mendeley

• Primary use case: reference management
• Document sharing and collaboration on the side
• Researcher profile/promotion
• Like RG, terms of use place burden on users

Publisher crackdowns

Making your research freely available

• Publish in quality open access journals
  • Keep your copyright
  • Often an "author pays" model
• Check self-deposit policy of journal
  • Many journals allow you to upload your pre-print to your institutional repository

Institutional repository?

LU|Zone|UL

• Run by the library since 2007 to provide access to the scholarly activity of the university community
• Contents are harvested and indexed in Google Scholar, WorldCat, and other general search engines
• Contact Dan Scott <dscott@laurentian.ca> for help

Google Scholar

• Great at tracking down freely available copies of articles
• Offers clean researcher profiles and (minimal) networking
• Intelligent literature awareness service
• Interesting citation metrics

Access to research: the dark side

r/scholar, LibGen, SciHub

I highly recommend staying away from these.

r/scholar

LibGen

• Like The Pirate Bay, with a focus on written works
• Entire corpus distributed via BitTorrent
• Pretty clearly some massive violation of copyright going on

SciHub

SciHub

• Uses phished or freely shared(!) user names and passwords to access university collections.
• At Laurentian, abused accounts have resulted in off-campus access to ScienceDirect and other resources being shut down.
• BTW, your proxy account == your email account == many other Laurentian accounts.
• It's just a bad idea.

RACER

• RACER gives the library statistics to justify new journal subscriptions.
• Articles are delivered within a week, usually a few days, via email. For free!
• Your use is covered under fair dealing copyright provisions.

Twitter: a promotion engine

Twitter can reward the sassy