Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?

The deployment of institutional repository services has focussed on the development of services for managing content within the organisation or by a trusted agency. At the same time we have seen developments to support management of the use of metadata to maximize access to content hosted in repositories. Related technical approaches, such as 'cool URIs' can also make content more discoverable by search engines such as Google. In parallel we are witnessing the increasing take-up of a range of third-party services such as LinkedIn and Academia which are being used by researchers to publish information related to their professional activities, including details of their research publications. The paper provides evidence which suggests that personal use of such services can increase the number of downloads by increasing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) rankings through inbound links from highly ranked web sites. A survey of use of such services across Russell Group universities shows the popularity of a number of social media services. In the light of existing usage of these services this paper proposes that institutional encouragement of their use by researchers may generate increased accesses to institutional research publications at little cost to the institution. This paper concludes by describing further work which is planned in order to investigate the SEO characteristics of institutional repositories.