Hi Matt,

I haven't heard very many folks asking about Research Gate on campus
myself, though I don't often get to directly engage researchers.  That
said, social features don't have to be orthogonal to repository services.
 In fact, we incorporated a bunch of these -- sharing with
Twitter/Facebook/Google+, user profiles, following/unfollowing, activity
streams, and some others -- into our repository service, ScholarSphere.

A major theme for our 2014 development is integration with external
services to situate the repository in an ecosystem of networked services
(and, let's face it, these are all probably more widely used than the
repository itself, so why not create flows to pull and push content and
metadata from them?).  Of course we're an institution with some cycles to
put towards sustained custom development, so I realize that this is an
answer that reflects some privilege that not every institution has; for
some, just keeping a DSpace instance running is a resource strain, so I
acknowledge this isn't for everyone.

Best of luck,

-Mike



On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 12:29 PM, Matthew Sherman
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Hi Code4Libbers,
>
> Hope everyone is enjoying the conference.  I am sad I was unable to
> make it but I like what I have been able to catch of the livestream.
> Anyway, I wanted to get some community thoughts on an issue I have
> been noticing lately.  I have run into an assortment of faculty that
> are convinced the Research Gate should replace the institutional
> repository at their schools.  Being the the repository guy at where I
> work this is rather disconcerting since they do very different things.
>  Research Gate is a form of social media service, whereas the
> repositories are all about preservation and access.  I have tried to
> articulate this point to them without much success.  As such I wanted
> to consult the collective brilliance of Code4Lib to see if anyone else
> has also run into this or have thoughts on how to respond.  This may
> seem like a trivial issue, but it has come up enough that I am
> starting to get concerned for the safety the repository.  So any
> thoughts would be appreciated.  Thanks for your time and hope everyone
> is having a good conference.
>
> Matt Sherman
>