As a researcher, you spend time and energy completing important projects, but have you considered all the possible ways to share those findings with the scientific community?

Here we’ll discuss tools available for sharing, publishing, and archiving your work depending on the type of research output. Be sure to consider all your options when it comes to disseminating your work, and be aware of the strengths and limitations of each tool before you dive in.

Below are some options for those research findings you want to share, but that are still too early for the formal publishing process, or for when your article doesn’t fit the formal publishing mold. Keep in mind that these tools support many research outputs including, but also beyond, the classic journal article.   

• DigitalHub is Northwestern Medicine’s institutional repository, created to increase the discovery and recognition of our research and scholarship. With an easy-to-use interface and a variety of sharing options, DigitalHub is an excellent place to upload all types of documents. Also, it is indexed by Google, so your results will be highly visible online.
• The Winnower operates on the principle that the scholarly process should “winnow out” the truth through open discussion and debate. The Winnower combines an open access online publishing platform with an open post-publication peer-review process. They publish a wide variety of document types beyond the journal article, including grants, letters, and blogs.
• bioRxiv is a free online archive for unpublished preprints operated by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. bioRxiv allows researchers to make their findings immediately available and open for comments by the scientific community. Other options for pre-prints include the SSRN and arXiv repositories.  

You’ve spent hours preparing for a conference presentation, or putting the finishing touches on an informative poster. Take some time to consider how to share those outputs with an audience beyond those attending the conference.

• Speaker Deck, supported by GitHub (known for its collaborative platform for computer code management), makes it easy for presenters to upload a PDF file of their slides, turning those slides into a seamless presentation. Another option for sharing slides is SlideShare.
• Vimeo is a video sharing website where you can upload a conference presentation (if allowed by the conference) or related videos. Basic membership is free and videos are generally free of distracting advertisements. Another option for videos is YouTube. 
• F1000 Posters (now merged with F1000 Research) is an open access poster repository for the life sciences and medicine, making your conference poster immediately available and visible online.  Approved posters or slides are given a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and are indexed by Sparrho and the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF).
• ScienceOpen Posters is supported by the open access publisher ScienceOpen. Submitted posters receive a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and are easy for viewers to download, share, comment or bookmark from ScienceOpen Posters journal. 
• As mentioned previously, Northwestern Medicine’s DigitalHub supports many document types, including conference posters, presentations, and other related materials. 

Big data is a trending topic that seems to affect almost everyone in research. Data management plans are an important part of research. Beyond submitting your data to an appropriate repository, consider publishing it in data-specific journals.

• Dryad is a curated repository of data files associated with any published article in the sciences or medicine, and it ensures researchers get credit for their data by promoting data citation and tracking of data-reuse.
• Zenodo is an open access repository funded by CERN and OpenAire as a home for research results (data and publications) that are not part of existing institutional or subject-based repositories. 
• Mendeley Data is a program for managing, sharing, and discovering research data. Supported by the Elsevier publishing company, this repository provides a unique DOI for each dataset, and makes your data viewable alongside other similar research datasets.
• Figshare, supported by DigitalScience, is a free repository for making research outputs (datasets, figures, images, and videos) openly available. Items are given a DOI and a type, and all files are under a creative commons license.
• Giga Science is an online, open-access, open-data journal that publishes big-data studies in the life and biomedical sciences, and includes an extensive database that hosts all associated data.
• Scientific Data by Nature Publishing Group, is an open access, peer-reviewed publication for descriptions of scientific datasets. Publications are indexed by PubMed, and Google Scholar.
• Re3data is a global registry of research data repositories for the academic community. The registry is funded by the German Research Foundation and promotes increased access and better visibility of research data.

You put a lot of thought and effort into your instructional materials. Your preparation and work could serve as inspiration or guidance for other educators. You may also want your students to have easy access to materials you’ve created beyond the timeframe of the course.

• DigitalHub provides an open location for you to share presentations, handouts, syllabi and other course materials openly beyond the time limit of the semester. Save a snapshot in time of your course, or keep the materials up for learners to refer back to, by making them available in DigitalHub.
• Also mentioned earlier, online tools such as Speaker Deck, Slideshare, Vimeo, YouTube, and Figshare are available and may fit your needs for making instructional materials more easily accessible.
• Consider checking with Northwestern University’s Innovation and New Ventures Office for copyright policies and agreements related to materials you’ve created.  

Have you taken your writing beyond the page limit of a journal article? Perhaps you’ve written a small manual or longer text on a topic of interest. Consider making your work widely available using these tools.

• Wikibooks is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content textbooks that anyone can annotate, edit, update, or correct at any time. Wikibooks have volunteer editors that oversee contributions to the book. 
• As mentioned previously, Northwestern Medicine’s DigitalHub supports many document types, including collections of papers written on a topic. 

The scientific community interacts in many ways, giving you plenty of options to find one that sparks your interest. In addition to sharing about your research through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, consider these tools below.

• Kudos is a software service that helps researchers enrich their publications by incorporating a plain language description and communicating it via social media channels. Kudos also measures the impact of these activities and sends regular updates to the author.
• Pint of Science is a non-profit that organizes an annual global science festival with a location in Chicago. All presentations are made available in podcast format. 
• Wordpress is a blogging system that allows users to set up their own blog and post content online. Researchers can write about their peer-reviewed work, and register with Research Blogging (see below) to gain more attention for their work. Another option for blogging is Blogger.
• Research Blogging allows researchers to find blog posts written about peer-reviewed research. Users register their blog with the site and allow software to scan their blog for content. The research-related content is then indexed and displayed on the Research Blogging front page. The editorial team sifts through blog posts and shares notable posts on the news page.

Galter Library’s Metrics and Impact Core can help you create a dissemination plan that suits your scholarly communication needs. We can also help your students or mentees by providing an in-depth review of some of the resources listed here. If you’d like assistance, begin by contacting your liaison librarian.

Also, see our guide “From Research to Publication” for more tools and resources.

Please note: Galter Library does not endorse any particular tool mentioned in this article. Instead, we provide ideas, options, and guidance on the many tools available.