Many types of sharing platforms accept scholarly work, including those provided by Boston College, commercial platforms and disciplinary repositories.
Some important considerations in choosing a platform:
BC repositories and some popular commercial platforms are discussed on this page. You may choose to deposit versions of your scholarly work in more than one place to take advantage of different features or audiences. Learn more about disciplinary data repositories or ask your Subject Librarian for help in choosing the right repository for your work.
eScholarship@BC is the online archive of Boston College scholarship, managed by the Boston College Libraries.
The aim of eScholarship@BC is to showcase and preserve Boston College's scholarly output in digital form and to make it freely accessible globally, supporting the social justice mission of the University.
Benefits of deposit in eScholarship@BC:
Increase access to your published scholarship by making it more openly available (many readers do not have access to subscription journal articles)
Distribute unpublished works, papers, conference presentations
Enable readers to find your works more easily via search engines
Encourage higher citation rates and greater impact through wider readership
See statistics on views and downloads of your scholarship
Receive guidance on copyright issues
Showcase the breadth, quality and output of scholarly work at Boston College
Comply with grant-funder or government requirements for openness
Your scholarship will be digitally preserved for long term use
Receive a permanent link for each item to embed in a CV or email
The Boston College Dataverse is an open access data repository for researchers affiliated with Boston College. You can upload your research data to improve impact, visibility and access to your data. Deposited data will automatically generate citation information and a Digital Object Identifer (DOI) that can be used to cite your data and link to publications and presentations. Boston College Dataverse can play an important role in fulfilling Data Management Plan requirements by funding agencies, such as NSF and NIH, and provide for data re-use and archiving.This archive is supported by the Boston College Libraries and hosted by the Harvard Dataverse Network. You can receive additional support from librarians for your deposit by contacting dataverse-support@bc.edu
Figshare allows free public sharing of data. It accepts any file format and accepts uploads of < 5GB per file and a total private storage amount of 20 GB for free accounts. It gives unlimited space for public data and issues DOIs for data citation. It also allows sharing of private files with collaborators. Data made publicly available in figshare is usually available under an Creative Commons or other open license. Material in figshare is digitally preserved as part of the Digital Preservation Network. Figshare is also an ORCID partner, so information about the data you publish in figshare will be pushed to your ORCID profile. More features.
Commons Open Repository Exchange (CORE) is a full-text, interdisciplinary, repository designed to increase the impact of work in the humanities. Managed by the office of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association, CORE integrates with the Humanities Commons network for humanists.
Why would I deposit my digital work with CORE?
Learn about what kinds of items you can deposit with CORE.
GitHub is a web-based repository hosting service, used mostly for code. The service offers version-control, along with task management, bug tracking, and wiki features. While GitHub is mostly used in computer science, other fields are increasingly using the service for sharing research materials.
ResearchGate is an academic social networking site that allows users to share research and data. Its primary audience consists of scientists. Researchers should be aware, however, that the site seeks to monetize user data and provides no infrastructure for preservation of content. Additionally, many researchers find that the site spams them and hold a low opinion of the platform.
Like ResearchGate, Academia.edu is an academic social networking site. Its audience is primarily humanists and social scientists, but it shares many of the same issues around data privacy, preservation, and spam as ResearchGate.
As an alternative to sharing your research on this site these sites, we recommend depositing research and data into BC's eScholarship and/or Dataverse. The Digital Scholarship Group is also happy to consult with you about building a personal academic site.
Mendeley, like Scopus, is owned by the Elsevier publishing corporation, and provides a mixture of reference citation, remote data storage, and social networking services. Its free version (with required registration) has two components: a desktop program in which you may search for publications, build collections of reference citations, and upload open versions of your published work; and a website where you may build your own author profile as part of a scholarly social network. Having an author profile allows you to follow other profiles, send messages to other users, share citation collections and your own work, and keep current on other users' activities via a 'feed'. Mendeley provides the option of integrating a Scopus Author ID into an author profile.
There are many other ways to share your work, both scholarly material and grey literature, on commonly known social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo, and YouTube; as well as with curated and/or discipline specific tools and sites, e.g., ERIC, Merlot, H-Net, arXiv.org, etc. Below are a few general-purpose sites and tools.
