How to share my published article? A practical guide to sharing open access articles on digital media This is a practical guide with several instructions and tips on how authors can contribute to the dissemination of their published research, focused on open access publications. More than five thousand scientific articles are published daily, so authors need to make the best efforts to obtain visibility (Mendes-da-Silva, 2018). The sharing of scholarly articles enables collaboration, professional relationships and advances in science and discovery, so researchers should learn the art of using social media, scholarly collaboration networks, and other online platforms to engage with individuals and groups within and beyond academia, including key policy influencers and decision makers, and with individuals with shared interests. This way it will help to increase the dissemination of their work (Tripathy, Bhatnagar, Shewade, Kumar, Zachariah, & Harries, 2017). Many studies have shown that there is a statistically significant correlation between social media mentions such as posts, tweets, blogs and citation counts (Tripathy et al., 2017). However, the ways information is shared are rapidly evolving and how best to share articles can be unclear. Differences in journal policies can add to this confusion, so authors should always check the article's distribution license and the publisher’s self-archiving policy before sharing the full text with the community (How Can I Share It, 2020). With 10 main topics, this guide presents a non-exhaustive list of strategies to increase the dissemination of research results, in order to facilitate the effective impact of published scientific works. In summary: 1) Include or mention your articles in scientific social networks and free repositories (Mendeley, SSRN, Academia, ResearchGate, RePEc, Methodspace, Google Scholar); 2) Make effective use of regular social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram); 3) Create and share podcasts; 4) Share your research data and materials in public repositories (Slideshare, F1000 Research, Figshare, Zenodo); 5) Disseminate your research via personal blogs; 6) Obtain and use an author identifier (ORCID) to distinguish you from other researchers; 7) Write a Press Release about your article; 8) Use digital toolkits to disseminate your work (Kudos, ImpactStory, How Can I Share It); 9) Customize your e-mail signatures and business cards; 10) Contribute to discussion forums and events related to your publications. Check for specific details and step-by-step tips in the upcoming pages: 1 1) Include or mention your articles in scientific social networks and free repositories . Mendeley (Research Network) . SSRN . Academia . Researchgate . RePEc . Methodspace . Google Scholar Mendeley (Research Network) (https://www.mendeley.com/?interaction_required=true) Researchers trust Mendeley to share ideas, see what’s new in their field and discuss important developments, facilitating collaboration across the globe and in every field of research. Create your research profile: create your research profile and include a curated list of your publications and affiliations. Mendeley makes it easy to promote your work to one of the world's largest scientific communities. Create and join groups: anyone with a Mendeley account can start or join a Public or Private Group. Dedicated to specific topics, they're a great way to recommend your papers and hold discussions on subjects relevant to you. Collaborate with colleagues worldwide by creating a new group dedicated to your topic and invite colleagues from all over the world to join. Include your published papers in your reading lists: share what you’re reading via reading lists and browse other members' public reading lists to discover relevant content. Make new connections so they become acquainted with your work: Discover new connections by searching for people on Mendeley and finding researchers with similar interests via Public Groups. You can also follow new people from suggestions in your Mendeley feed. SSRN (https://hq.ssrn.com/login/pubsigninjoin.cfm) Formerly known as Social Science Research Network, SSRN is a repository for preprints and international journal devoted to the rapid dissemination of scholarly research in the social sciences and humanities and more areas. Upload your published paper: academic papers in PDF format can be uploaded directly to the SSRN site by authors and are then available around the world via download. Users can also subscribe to abstracting emails covering a broad range of research areas and topic specialties. These distributing emails contain abstracts (with links to the full text where applicable) of papers recently submitted to SSRN in the respective field. Check your rankings: on SSRN, authors and papers are ranked by their number of downloads, which has become an informal indicator of popularity on prepress and open access sites. Academia (https://www.academia.edu/) Academia is another multidisciplinary academic networking site. It has a strong profile and curriculum vitae feature and is excellent for showcasing achievements, publications, and expertise. Create your profile: register your free account and complete your profile information. Upload your papers: use this area as a repository for all your published papers in open access journals. Discover and be discovered: select your areas of interest to make sure your profile and your papers are found by readers and researchers worldwide. You can browse the networks of people with similar interests. Also, Academia will feed you with suggestions of new publications on a regular basis. Measure your impact: available measures of impact include counts for profile views, document views, document downloads, unique visitors, external links to documents, geographic distribution of visitors and referrals. 2 ResearchGate (https://www.researchgate.net/) ResearchGate is a for-profit, social media–like scientific networking and collaboration website. ResearchGate’s primary feature is the individual researcher profile, which is used to promote scholarly production. Site members can follow other researchers and their work, identify colleagues and coworkers such as lab personnel, and share details of current projects (O’Brien, 2019). Create your profile: register your free account and complete your profile with contact, career information and your research interests. You may input information harvested from literature databases and other sources. Upload PDFs from your open access published articles. Maintain your profile updated: in your author dashboard you will be able to keep track of citations to published work, see links to citations of potential interest, and selected impact metrics. Profiles can be augmented by including a photograph, citations to work that has not been discovered by ResearchGate, and full-text article content for sharing with other members. Engage in forums: one distinctive feature is a question submission-and-response knowledgebase, allowing members to pose, respond to, and track questions regarding research and other topics of interest. RePEc (https://authors.repec.org/) RePEc is the world's largest collection of on-line Economics working papers, journal articles and software. The RePEc Author Service (RAS) provides multiple utilities for the authors, the other RePEc services, the general user community, and beyond. (The REPEC Blog, 2019) Create and maintain a public profile of your work: Input your name, affiliation and list your work. This information is used by the various RePEc services to create author profiles that allow to link people, institutions, and works with each other. This provides users more options when they are browsing through the bibliographic databases that are the core of RePEc. (The REPEC Blog, 2019) Distinguish yourself from other homonyms in the profession: Once an author is registered, a RePEc Short-ID is created. This unique and permanent code is then used throughout RePEc services as well as by others (for example, Wikipedia, WikiData) to uniquely identify authors. Also, when authors register, they claim as theirs the works that are suggested by RePEc. (The REPEC Blog, 2019) Receive statistics about your papers: Registered authors are notified every month about newly found citations, along with various statistics about the visibility of their works. All the data collected (author profiles, affiliations, citations and more) are used to compute various rankings that have become quite popular. Of course, this means that authors need to keep their profiles current with any work additions and affiliation changes. (The REPEC Blog, 2019) MethodSpace (www.methodspace.com) MethodSpace is a multidimensional online network for the community of researchers, from students to professors, engaged in research methods. Sponsored by SAGE Publishing, the site is created for students and researchers to network and share research, resources and debates. MethodSpace users have free access to selected journal articles, book chapters, etc which highlight emerging topics in the field (Methodspace, 2020). Create your account and upload your content: start by creating your own page with your profile, research interests, Podcasts, videos and add links to your published papers. You can also start a blog; upload poster presentations, podcasts, and videos; create open and closed discussions. Join forums and start interest groups: the easiest place to start getting the most out of MethodSpace is the forum