Skip to Main Content

**The Locker Box**

Reusable assets for NYU Libraries guide authors.

Scholarly Networking Sites

Picture of a white macintosh keyboard with a green "Share" button

Image: "Share" by GotCredit via Flickr.com, CC BY 2.0

Some organizations offer you a place to share your scholarly output. They work as scholarly social networks that allow you to interact with others in your field and share work and ideas. It’s important to learn as much as you can about these organizations by reading their terms of use. Some, like ResearchGate and Academia.edu, seem like nonprofit entities but are actually run by for-profit companies who may or may not sell your private data. As such, sharing your work on their sites may be a violation of your publication agreement. Others, such as Humanities Commons or ScholarlyHub, are actual nonprofit groups run by and for scholars like you. In addition, many of these nonprofit organizations have an explicit mission to support the open dissemination of scholarship through open access.

For help in figuring out the difference between different scholarly sharing platforms and the ways you can legally share you work on them, please reach out to your subject librarian or the scholarly communication librarian.