Making Scholarly Connections You can use a variety of alternative scholarly social network and profile tools and do so without violating copyright, if you’d like. Here’s how. ResearchGate is a popular platform that researchers around the world use. Unfortunately, they encourage authors to upload copyrighted content without clearly informing them of the risks, and may even upload content on your behalf, but without your consent. One way around this issue is to put the URL for the materials you have posted in the DigitalCommons in the abstract in ResearchGate. This makes your work findable on the platform, easily accessible, and protects you from copyright infringement claims, as you have the right to post versions of your work on URI’s DigitalCommons. Google Scholar has its own profile tool that automatically links to your materials on their hosting sites, whether it’s a publisher’s website or the DigitalCommons. You can get to it easily after you log in to your URI email account. Head to scholar.google.com, and click on My Citations at the top. Mendeley is a citation manager, but it’s a great tool for sharing your work and connecting with other researchers. As you add your citations to Mendeley, you can provide a link to the official version of your publication on the publisher’s site, but also a link to your work in the DigitalCommons. Academia.edu is also very popular. Like ResearchGate, prompts encourage users to upload papers, but there’s a workaround. Click on the “No file to upload?” link, and add information - including a link to the work posted in DigitalCommons - on the following page. ImpactStory encourages you to link to your existing materials, and connects to ORCID to import materials. ORCID is a non-profit organization supported by university and other institutional members with the goal of author disambiguation. ORCID generates a persistent identifier you can use on other sites to collect your research and identify yourself when applying for grants. Once you set up a profile, you can add publications in a number of ways.

A related tool is ResearcherID, a similar product from Thomson Reuters. As a URI researcher, you can sign up for a ResearcherID, and add your publications. Finally, LinkedIn: LinkedIn connects to SlideShare , but you can also upload your presentations to the DigitalCommons, and provide your connections with an ad-free experience.