Of course, CUNY is not the first to have this idea!
In fact, repositories of scholarly information are abundant on the web. You've probably used scholarly repositories before without even knowing it, since their results are crawled by Google, Google Scholar, and other search engines. Many of the results from web searches on scholarly topics are from institutional or subject repositories.
There are a few types of repositories, which I'll detail below.
Many colleges and universities, large and small, provide institutional repositories, in which their faculty and students can self-archive their work. Much like Academic Works, these repositories might include scholarly works, special collections, and administrative materials.
For instance, there are institutional respositories at:
Some repositories are dedicated to archiving and making available work in a one or more subject areas. Some examples include:
Some of the biggest subject repositories are in the areas of computer science and physics, but as I hope my examples show, they are not limited to those fields. Subject repositories often become hubs of discussion for members of a discipline. Researchers are more likely to begin their search there than in an institutional repository.
However, some publisher guidelines forbid archiving in subject repositories while allowing institutional repositories. Additionally, subject repositories often limit the types of documents they consider in scope.
Increasingly, grants will ask you to share your data as well as your articles. Repositories are arising to meet this need.
Some academic social networks also include some of the functions of repositories (though I would argue they are not really repositories). These sites also allow researchers to post their work, but are funded by venture capital and they make money from user data, rather than being run by institutions or by academics in a discipline.
You've probably heard of:
Please be aware that publishers look less kindly on these sorts of repositories than they do on either of the others!
Elsevier famously sent takedown notices to authors who had posted their papers on Academia.edu. They also do not offer all the services that the CUNY Academic Works does, including privacy protection, copyright guidance, preservation, and help complying with funding requirements.
I'd recommend depositing your work in a scholarly repository, either institutional or disciplinary, rather than a site like ResearchGate.
Interested in browsing through other repositories? You can look here:
