While we encourage faculty members to maintain professional websites if they choose to do so, there are pitfalls involved with displaying work on academic social media (ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.). Unless your publishing agreement allows it, if you post your publications in their entirety (such as uploading the final pdf), there is a high chance you are violating the stipulations of your publishing agreement. Institutional repositories, on the other hand, provide a means of featuring your work in a way that will make it both accessible and compliant with the publishers you sign with.
The primary benefit of contributing your scholarship to ScholarsCommons is that all of your work is consolidated within your personalized profile. This allows those searching for your work to positively identify your research, which is far more reliable and less labor-intensive than searching via other avenues such as Google Scholar (where it's likely other researchers who share your name will also have work available, making it easy to confuse your work with that of another individual). In addition, you can also include work beyond solely strictly published scholarship, such as conference posters and curriculum-based materials.
