In “Research Output Availability on Academic Social Networks: Implications for Stakeholders in Academic Publishing,” Mikael Laakso, Juho Lindman, Cenyu Shen, Linus Nyman, and Bo-Christer Björk study the role of Academic Social Networks (ASNs) in the scholarly communication landscape. In particular, the authors look at the popular, commercial platforms ResearchGate and academia.edu, and “the degree of full-text access that ASNs provide as a share of total research output of an institution” (127). Laakso et al. argue that the impact and prominence of ASNs are often ignored in open scholarship conversations, even though the authors’ study proves that ASNs are the most prevalent source for full-text publications (from researchers at the Hanken School of Economics, Finland). Laakso et al. use the prominence of ASNs to suggest that institutional repositories could benefit from becoming better service providers for their users as well as from linking to other institutional repositories more readily. As it stands, each institutional repository is relatively siloed, providing a gap for commercial ventures like academia.edu and ResearchGate to fill by providing access to research from many different authors and their many different institutions.

Work cited

Laakso, Mikael, Juho Lindman, Cenyu Shen, Linus Nyman, and Bo-Christer Björk. 2017. “Research Output Availability on Academic Social Networks: Implications for Stakeholders in Academic Publishing.” Electronic Markets 27(2): 125–33. doi:10.1007/s12525-016-0242-1