Tracking Your Scholarly Research Impact

Institutional or discipline-specific open access repositories enable you to self-archive a copy of your work so that it is accessible for free by readers around the world. 
Moreover, these repositories are indexed on Google so that your scholarship can easily be found. This is a terrific way to build readership and impact, while also contributing to progress and knowledge by making a version of your work available to all.

Step One: Choose a repository that’s right for you:

• Open Science Framework (OSF) - The OSF hosts repositories across the disciplines.  They are leading the way in a new preprint revolution to facilitate open access to and community review of new research prior to publication.
• Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) PsychRN - a subject specific (Psychology), open access platform for authors to showcase their research. Membership is free but creating an account is necessary.
• PubMed Central - a free, full-text repository that archives biomedical and life sciences journal literature

Step Two: Check the web tool Sherpa/ROMEO to determine whether your publisher has authorized versions of your work to be deposited in an open repository.​

Open access is the free, immediate, online availability of scholarship. This means that when people publish a scholarly article in an open access journal, it is put online for anyone to access and thus improves equitable access to knowledge.

• Journal subscription paywalls limit readership. The great value of publishing open access means that barriers between readers and scholarly publication are removed, making it easier for everyone to find, use, cite, and build upon knowledge and ideas. In this way, open access connects your scholarship to the world, and helps build your impact.

• Publishing open access is often a condition of research funding, so you should check your grants.​

• Open access publishers may ask for a fee to publish your scholarship open online in lieu of the fees they would ordinarily have collected from institutional memberships to the journal or publication.​