2.1 Support to research

A personal website supports scholarly research work by enhancing the impact of published research and networking possibilities.
The impact of published research because through “green” self-archiving of formerly paywalled research articles on the personal academic website, research is made freely and openly accessible to all [16]. Yet, nearly thirty years after 1994 Harnad’s “subversive proposal” [17] to make publicly retrievable all research articles through FTP archives, scholars worldwide continue to notself-archive their articles. For example, in 2014 Bjork and co-workers found that while nearly all publishers allowed self-archiving of accepted version manuscripts in institutional or subject repositories immediately after publication (in 62% of cases) of after one year since publication (in 79%), the share of self-archived research articles was around 12% of annual articles [18]. “The real barrier to green OA”, the team concluded “is author behavior”, with most authors being “unaware of what they can do” [18].
In brief, “green” self-archiving paywalled research papers remains a critically important, and largely untapped, task. For example, even if the share of sampled articles published in 2018 made OA on at least one website in 2020 increased to 62% [19], this is certainly not the case for papers published by authors prior to 2017 in paywalled journals, the majority of which remains paywalled on publisher websites.
Since more than two decades both researchers [20] and students [21] search for previous publications online only. A research paper, thus, either is posted online or is invisible [22]. As early as of 2001, Lawrence found an average 336% citation advantage to online articles compared to offline articles published in the same journal [23]. Yet, researchers continue to not “green” self-archive their own research papers even in Germany and even in fields such as medicine where anticipated knowledge sharing via openly accessible research papers and clinical trials can literally save lives [24].
So why scholars should self-archive their own research papers on a personal academic website, rather than relying on their institutional repository? One reason is suggested by the case of the aforementioned Lawrence’s paper [23]. Brody and Harnad cite the self-archived version of the latter paper in their 2004 presentation describing the Harnad’s research-impact cycle [22].
Unfortunately, the link [25] to an edited version of the paper (supposed to be self-archived on the online repository of the research institute to which Lawrence was affiliated when he published the study) 19 years later is no longer working.
On the other hand, Matthew Brown, a philosophy scholar at Southern Illinois University, by late 2022 “replaced all of the Academia dot edu links on my website to either self-archived or open access versions” [26]. The personal academic website (Figure 1) now includes all the author’s publications [27].