Trends in the Use of Repositories and Academic Social Networks to Give Visibility to Scholarly Papers in Library, Information Sciences, and Communication

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the habits of researchers and librarians when promoting their work through repositories and academic social networks in the fields of Information, Documentation and Communication. Repositories are also used for preservation and early publication (preprints) of journal articles. Methodology: A bibliographic review, an online survey, interviews with experts, and an analysis of the evolution of some repositories have been carried out. Results: Thematic repositories, which were widely used 20 years ago, are now facing competition from institutional repositories (IR) and academic social networks such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu and others. A continued decrease in the number of deposits in the e-LIS (Eprints in Library and Information Science) and MPRA (Munich Personal RePEc Archive) repositories has been observed in recent years, which seems to be due to the fact that many universities have published mandates that force professors to archive their work in their IR. Another important cause of the decrease in deposits is the greater availability of open access journals in recent years, which has made it less necessary to archive articles in repositories. Academic social networks, on the other hand, are perceived as more dynamic, allowing interaction with other authors, and not requiring the introduction of so much metadata to upload documents.