 |
There are ways to boost the visibility of your scholarly work on the web; perhaps two of the simplest are making your work easily discoverable outside of traditional indexes and making it easy for those interested in reading your work to do so. Negotiating a somewhat more flexible publishing agreement (e.g. not giving a publisher exclusive publication rights) will allow you to post papers in other places, and many publishers have become amenable to a more generous approach to publication rights in the past several years. The following suggestions are by no means comprehensive, but serve as easy ways you can increase the visibility of your work on the web. Personal Websites: A personal website is an obvious way to boost the visibility of your scholarly work. When posting citations to published work, try to include the permanent link (also known as stable link or DOI) to online journal publications. This will allow researchers to easily move from your page to the paper. Post the full text of papers and presentations wherever possible. Social Networking: A number of social networking sites dedicated to academic social networking have recently appeared. Sites such as academia.edu allow researchers to create a personal page, post papers and other work, and associate themselves with their institution’s academic department as well as various disciplines and areas of study. Users can then “follow” others in the network. Academia.edu profiles are open to Google and, much like Facebook, the software aims to connect people with like interests. While the longevity of such sites is unclear, academia.edu currently boasts over 210,000 users, and 852 users from York University.
YorkSpace Research Repository: York University Libraries hosts a digital research repository, YorkSpace, where York-affiliated researchers can deposit their research outputs. It provides a permanent home for your work and the assigned permanent URL can be used as a link from your personal webpage or other webpages. It is also an excellent tool for opening up your research to a wider audience. Research repositories use standardized metadata, making them highly favoured in Google search rankings. In fact, your work is much more discoverable in a research repository than on a personal website. Last month alone, Professor H.S. Harris' work Not Said But Shown was downloaded 1035 times!
As mentioned above, publishers are becoming increasingly open to allowing for archiving of articles and book chapters in research repositories and work previously published can often be posted. YorkSpace can accommodate a variety of formats, opening up the possibilities for posting audio and slide files from presentations, as well as working papers and other “grey” literature. To find out more information about YorkSpace, contact Andrea Kosavic, Digital Initiatives Librarian akosavic@yorku.ca. —Librarians Stacy Allison-Cassin, Bibliographic Services and Andrea Kosavic, Digital Initiatives |
New Directions at Canada’s National Science Library PubMed Central Canada is the new archive for life sciences research launched by NRC-CISTI in collaboration with the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). PMC Canada will provide greater visibility to Canadian research as CIHR policy requires researchers to deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts there. Research data is important for the scientific record and must be preserved. NRC-CISTI has joined DataCite, an international consortium of libraries, research organizations and data centres with a mission to increase access to research data on the Internet. Technical infrastructure is being developed by NRC-CISTI to allow registration of datasets beginning early next year. Through DataCite, it will be possible to assign unique identifiers to datasets, allowing researchers to locate, identify and cite data and enhance research collaboration while avoiding the duplication of experiments. In March 2010 NRC Research Press was incorporated into “Canadian Science Publishing”, a not-for-profit company. NRC Press journals are compliant with open access policies of top international granting bodies, including CIHR. Authors have extensive rights to archive pre-prints and post-prints of their manuscripts six months after publication. Although the NRC Press journals will continue to be open for access to all Canadians, archiving in an institutional repository such as YorkSpace will ensure even greater visibility, and York authors are encouraged to do this. For further information please contact your subject librarian. — L. Fernandez and R. Nariani, Science Librarians, Steacie Science & Engineering Library |
