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].