Scholarly Online Presence Management

Google Scholar is a free service that can provide information about where you are being cited (and by whom). Create a Google Scholar profile and Google will automatically add publications it believes to have been authored by you. In the future, as additional articles, presentations, and other scholarly artifacts containing citations of your work are indexed by Google, those citations will automatically be added to your profile. You also set up automatic alerts to be notified when your work is cited. If you have a particularly common name, it’s a good idea to review the items that are automatically applied to your profile, and adjust your settings so that you can approve newly indexed items others before they are added to your profile.

Google Scholar also provides functionality that allows you to export citations from your profile so that you can preserve a local copy of your citations or import your data into a citation management software, such as Zotero.

UMD Libraries strongly recommends that students and faculty sign up for an ORCID account, a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from any other scholar. This can help to ensure that your research is correctly attributed to you even when it’s published under a different variation of your name, and to disambiguate you from other authors who have the same or a similar name. Your ORCID stays the same throughout your academic career, even if you move to another institution and can therefore help you create a consistent and holistic record of your entire academic career. You can also choose to make your ORCID profile public or keep it private. 

Linking your ORCID account to an employer, publisher, or funder and other researcher IDs you may have (such as a Scopus ID or Clarivate ResearcherID) will allow ORCID to suggest additions to your ORCID profile. In fact, an increasing number of journal publishers, funders, academic institutions, and research groups have begun requiring ORCID IDs for all authors and researchers, and the ORCID ID is increasingly used as an authentication method for other platforms and services. Learn more!

We highly recommend building and maintaining a website representing your scholarly identity online, separate from your UMD faculty page. Graduate students are also encouraged to begin developing online profiles and portfolios in the form of a researcher website as they develop a scholarly reputation and body of work. If possible, we recommend investing in a hosting platform that will allow you to use an open source software to set yourself up with the greatest autonomy over your intellectual property and ability to save, migrate, and delete your website content over time. 

We strongly discourage students and faculty from using Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and other commercial scholarly profile and research sharing sites; We also recommend against using commercial site building platforms like Wix and SquareSpace to construct researcher websites. 

• These platforms include terms of service and host content in proprietary formats that may allow the company to store and share your intellectual property in ways that you have not active consented to.
• It is also difficult to absolutely delete or remove your content from these platforms and ensure it is no longer indexed by search engines.
• Due to the proprietary formats, it is also usually not possible to export and migrate data in the event that you would like to move your website to another hosting platform.  

We recommend using an open source alternative such as WordPress or GitHub Pages to construct researcher websites. Reclaim Hosting is an affordable, trusted option for website hosting that is widely used in the academic community and will allow you to install WordPress as well as a range of other open source academic softwares. 

For your website content, we make the following recommendations: 

• Keep your site (and CV) updated!
• Take advantage of the non-paper nature of the Web: embed video or audio of you teaching or talking, include a slide deck from a recent presentation, link to openly available versions of your publications.
• Include links to your other profiles across the Web so that other researchers can find you wherever they prefer to network. If you use Twitter professionally, consider embedding your Twitter feed on your site.
• Include a short bio and a photo so that people can quickly understand your research interests and experience.
• If your work is being talked about in the media, be sure to link to that coverage!
• Consider adding a research blog where you can think through ideas, new projects, and events you attend, in addition to the more static content on your site.
   

Repositories provide an excellent way to preserve and share your research. In addition to secure storage for your digital files, many academic repositories offer discovery mechanisms, such as indexing to academic databases and library catalogs and the minting of digital identifiers like DOIs. This exposure can provide increased access to your work, which may raise the likelihood that your work will be read and cited. Repositories can also help you to fulfill open access mandates from funding agencies. 

• The repository at the University of Maryland, College Park is called DRUM (Digital Repository at the University of Maryland). If you are a UMD affiliate, you may deposit any kind of files to DRUM at no cost, making it an ideal place not only to share published works, but other forms of gray literature, such as working papers, conference proceedings, presentations, and learning objects. 
• There are a variety of generalist repositories that can be utilized for larger file storage or certain kinds of files, such as data repositories like Dryad and Zenodo. The University of Maryland is a member or supporter of many of these organizations. However, there may be fees or other requirements to use these repositories, so you should always investigate their policies before selecting one of these venues to store and share your work.
• Disciplinary repositories, such as Humanities Commons CORE or Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) may provide services and audiences that are tailored to your field of research. 

Two important things to keep in mind when selecting a repository: 

1. Not all repositories fulfill funder requirements for preservation or open access. Please make sure to check the policies and certifications of a repository in order to ensure they meet your needs before electing the repository as a storage or publishing solution for your project or grant application! 
2. You will need to ensure that you have the right to publish materials to a repository. If you transferred all rights to the publisher of a work, for instance, you may need their permission to submit the items to a repository. Your agreement with the publisher should be able to tell you what rights you have retained and whether or not you will need to seek further permission to use a given repository. 

Digital files and web publications are very prone to obsolescence and inaccessibility due to the speed at which the internet and digital technologies are changing. We advise our students and faculty to be proactive in storing their scholarship even if it has been published elsewhere, as a way to maintain access to your intellectual property. Even if a publication seems to be easily accessible or linkable at the moment, you would hate to lose access to your personal accomplishments or portfolio items if a publisher or website ceased to operate, or if links were disrupted by migrations or other changes to the location of content online. 

We recommend that everyone use replicated personal storage strategies so that you are not reliant on a single copy of your content or data and to ensure that you have access to your files no matter where your career takes you. 

1. Save files on a local device (flash drive, external hard drive) as well as on a cloud storage account. 
2. Utilize a personal cloud storage account (dropbox, google drive) - one that is not tied to your current institutional or employee credentials. If you move on from your current affiliation, you will still have access to all important files without needing to undertake a major migration process. 
3. GitHub can be a great storage solution if you want to provide ongoing access to data or code, or want to version or iterate on a digital project 
4. If you are preserving a dataset or data supporting a digital project, consider constructing some guidelines on how you have structured/organized the content. Documentation about website settings (themes, customizations) will make it easier to rebuild a website with a data export. Save this documentation alongside data and project archive records

If you have published online or created a digital project, one aspect of preserving your work may involve one or more web archiving options. The strategies below will help you to take simple steps to ensure that there is a record of your project in its published form to use for portfolios, presentations, and personal records in the future. 

1. Take pictures and videos of your project in its published state. Take “pictures” (screen grabs) of each page and stage activities to show functions or demonstrate interaction (such as clicking on objects to expand modals, or performing a search). You should also consider taking screen captures at different points in your site’s development. This can be can be interesting and helpful in presenting on your project, reporting to funders on your progress, or otherwise reflecting on or documenting a digital project. GoFullPage is one browser extension that can get a screenshot of an entire webpage, not just what is visible in immediate browser view (which is especially useful for long scrolling webpages!)

2. If your site has a lot of interactive or multimedia elements, you may want to create a screencast - a video of your website in the browser - that captures these features in action. Narrate your screencast to provide context. Screencastify is a browser extension for capturing live activity on screen + simultaneous audio recording. It is free to record and download short videos or there are options to subscribe to record longer videos and/or access other features. 
3. The Wayback Machine stores and provides access to online content by crawling websites and storing a copy of their content in the Internet Archive. This is not a live or editable version of your webpage. However, you can continue to crawl web pages over their lifetime, and the wayback machine will store all crawled versions of the project, providing a means to see change over time.
   
   The Wayback Machine crawls and creates records at the PAGE level. For large projects with ongoing web archiving needs, you may be able to make use of the Internet Archive’s subscription archiving service Archive-It.

Many researchers share ideas and information with their disciplinary colleagues on mainstream commercial social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, but there are also commercial and nonprofit social networks specifically for academics. Academia.edu, ResearchGate, SSRN, and Mendeley are commercial enterprises funded by venture-capital or publishers. These sites are free to use, but as commercial operations, they profit by selling advertising space, ingesting user data and contacts (people must sign in or sign up to access your “open access” scholarship) and selling user data back to researchers and others. Terms of use for these sites may make it difficult or impossible to fully delete content from their servers, reducing your control over your intellectual property and online reputation. 

Unlike institutional, disciplinary, or generalist open repositories (such as Dryad or Zenodo) these commercial sites do not fulfill the public access requirements for grant-funded research nor offer long term preservation of your work. (For more information about the differences between commercial scholarly networks and institutional repositories, see this excellent article from the University of California's Office of Scholarly Communication.)

While we strongly discourage students and faculty from using Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and other commercial scholarly profile and research sharing sites as their primary online scholarly presence, we also recommend against using commercial site building platforms like Wix and SquareSpace to construct researcher websites. 

• These platforms include terms of service and host content in proprietary formats that may allow the company to store and share your intellectual property in ways that you have not active consented to.
• It is also difficult to absolutely delete or remove your content from these platforms and ensure it is no longer indexed by search engines.
• Due to the proprietary formats, it is also usually not possible to export and migrate data in the event that you would like to move your website to another hosting platform.  

We encourage all faculty and students to engage with copyright education in order to protect and assert their rights as authors and intellectual property producers. UMD Libraries provide a variety of resources to help you explore and understand your rights as an intellectual property owner and producer. While we cannot provide legal counsel, we are also happy to provide consultations and answer questions via lib-copyright@umd.edu. 

Keep in mind the following key points and explore further resources from OSS to feel confident asserting your rights. 

• You automatically own the copyright to any intellectual work that you create in a fixed format (write down either digitally or on paper, record, etc.). Therefore, as a thinker and creator, you are constantly creating intellectual property that may have value! Learn more about copyright basics.  
• You can (but do not need to) register your works with the US Copyright Office. Registration confers certain benefits if you become involved in litigation around copyright infringement. It will be easier to make a claim of prior ownership and may entitle you to greater damages if you are the plaintiff in the case. Explore resources from the Copyright Office about registration. 
• One of the best ways to ensure you are protecting your author rights is to read contracts and agreements with publishers and the terms of service for websites and platforms that you might use to share your work online.