Sharing your previously published research can increase its visibility and reach. It's important to understand the differences in the types of repositories to determine which is most appropriate for sharing your work. While there is some overlap between repository types, the three main types are:
It can be tricky to know which version of your work you can share. It's always a good idea to pay attention to your publication agreements, because they'll tell you exactly how you can legally share your works. But what if you don't have those agreements, or if you aren't sure which version is which? Visit the Which Version Can I Share? page for an overview of pre-prints, post-prints, publisher PDFs and for information on how to locate these records. Sharing the legally-allowed version of your research protects your works from being taken down.
Social networking sites for academics, such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, are used by some researchers to share their scholarly works and monitor analytics across disciplines. These sites are often used as social media and outreach tools. Because these types of sites have been regularly accused by publishers of massive copyright infringement, it's important that researchers pay close attention to the terms of service and privacy policies of these sites.
The University of California Office of Scholarly Communication provides a great read on the differences between academic social networking sites and open access repositories.
Scholar Commons is the Institutional Repository of the University of South Carolina. Hosted by the University Libraries, Scholar Commons allows USC researchers to archive and share their scholarly output such as dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, presentations, and conference papers in a university-branded repository.
The University of South Carolina does not currently have a system-wide, long-term archiving option for research data. However, many external disciplinary and general data repositories exist. If you want or need to share your research data, please visit the Sharing Data guide to locate an appropriate repository and find additional information.