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. For step-by-step instructions on how to deposit your work, please refer to the ScholarsCommons User Guide.
Instead of any given department or college's research spread across a range of journals and databases (which may or may not be accessible for many users), the IR unites that scholarship and makes it easily accessible within a single online location. The benefits of contributing your work to the IR makes it:
Making your work open access doesn't mean losing your copyright to your work, which is impossible unless you sign your copyright over to another entity, such as a journal publisher (go here for more info on retaining your copyright with publishers). What it does mean is that you have the power to make it so others can benefit from your research in a more equitable fashion. Here's some of the ways we can assist you in making your work openly accessible in ways that work for you:
One of the major benefits of IRs (and open access efforts in general), is the ability to address some of the barriers that are typically found within current publishing distribution models, specifically paywalls. While your students and colleagues may be able to access your journal article—provided that the university library has the funding to purchase that particular journal subscription, of course—the world is full of potential researchers who would benefit greatly from accessing your work (nurses, pharmacists, & teachers, for example) but can't as they're unable to pay for access and have no university affiliation (The No-Nonsense Guide to Research Support and Scholarly Communication, Claire Sewell, 2020).
The FGCU institutional repository (IR) is an invaluable means of extending the scholarly output of FGCU community members and programs for greater reach and increased circulation. This increased visibility, awareness, and stability benefits both content creators and the university by providing long-term archiving and preservation of FGCU research, which can be used for recruitment opportunities for new faculty and students. The IR is an ideal location to showcase materials such as student capstone projects—which could prove to be an effective means of demonstrating student learning outcomes—and promote academic excellence.
Per SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an IR is a means of providing "the potential to serve as tangible indicators of an institution's quality and to demonstrate the scientific, societal, and economic relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution's visibility, status, and public value" (SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist & Resource Guide, pg. 5).
