I already maintain profiles in ResearchGate and/or Academia.edu, why should I use SelectedWorks too?

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Jennifer Bliss

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Jan 9, 2017, 3:01:25 PM1/9/17

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SelectedWorks is derived from your content in Digital Commons, our open access repository run by CSUMB's Library staff. The primary aims of our institutional repository are: Making the scholarly outputs of the university as widely available as possible and ensuring long-term preservation of these outputs for future generations of academics.

ResearchGate and Academia.edu are both commercial social networking platforms whose primary aim is profit. There's nothing wrong with that, but as with all commercial enterprises (especially social networking) the company's "value" emanates from your profile data. Advertisements, products, and your raw profile data are (legally) bought-and-sold by them.

Also: Commercial Terms of Service (TOS), AKA: User Agreements, typically restrict you from copying or extracting your own profile data for other uses. Currently, as of this writing, ResearchGate and Academia.edu do not permit users to take their own profile data and reuse it elsewhere, nor do their terms of service permit the Library to extract that data on the author's behalf.

So, while you can (or at the time of writing one could) populate your commercial profiles with data from your SelectedWorks profile, the inverse is not possible. To eliminate double-entry, the most efficient use of your time is to maintain your SelectedWorks profile and then "push" your profile data to external profiles if maintaining synchronized profiles is important to you (and you've opted in to the terms and conditions obliged by ResearchGate and Academia.edu).

SelectedWorks@CSUMB won't ever apply terms of service limitations that prevent a user from sharing, syncing, or otherwise extracting your own profile data. Per the Library staff: "SelectedWorks and Digital Commons exists to serve the CSUMB community."