Tips for helping people to find your journal articles (and be able to read them)

After years of working on a project and getting it accepted for publication at a journal, it can be heartbreaking when no one reads it.

The two biggest barriers are usually: finding out about it, and having it behind a paywall. Since open-source publishing usually costs extra, I don't always have funding to do it. But here are tips on overcoming both barriers.

Helping people discover that your article exists:
People mostly find my research either through Google Scholar or Researchgate, although occasionally ORCID brings people in. Researchgate is easy to edit manually to add entries (but don't upload the full-text there publicly, see the section below for important legal considerations), and both ORCID and Google Scholar do a good job pulling articles directly from the journals (usually within a few weeks of publication). However! If ORCID or Google Scholar is missing any of your research you think should be listed, you can manually add entries there too (in Google go to your profile and hit the gray + above the list of articles, in ORCID hit "+ add works"). Note that blogs and other non-peer-reviewed sources will show up in Google Scholar if someone cites the source.

That helps scientists find your articles. But for anything you really hope will have an impact, sit down and make a communications plan, ideally when you're first designing the research in conjunction with key stakeholders and communications experts. Who do you hope will read the article, and what do you hope they will do as a result? Once you have your key audiences, consider whether writing a blog or two would help get people get interested (and get clear on the point of the paper), and enlist help in getting the message to the right people. The reason doing this early is so important is that you may actually write a different paper once you know what your intended audience currently thinks and cares about, and what may motivate them to take action.

OK, hopefully you've verified your research is all discoverable, but what if people want to actually read it? Most journals don't let you share the final version of the article at all (unless it's open-source), and they also don't let you host even a submitted / pre-formatted version on Researchgate. So here's the two-part trick I use:

Helping people access your article:
First, get a personal web site of some kind (there are plenty of free options, but it's important it's a personal site and not a repository like researchgate; I use freeshell.org which is crusty but very cheap - $36 for life).

Next, double-check the legal agreement for any publishers you want to share your content from (this is critical: this blog is not legal advice or a substitute for doing your homework on licensing for your articles). Most publishers grant permission to share a "submitted" version of the article on the author's personal web site (but nowhere else), and the ones that don't (or have an embargo) often grant it upon request (this just happened with me and Cambridge University Press). This is often called "self-archiving" or "green open access". So once you have verified permission, upload the files to your web site.

Then set up a "publications" page on your web site, which will help Google discover it. Google has instructions on how to do this and I have an example you can copy if desired here: http://fish.freeshell.org/publications.html
Usually once I add the entry to this page linking to the new pdf, Google Scholar finds it within about 3 weeks. The main thing is naming the web page "publications.html" and linking to the PDF via the article title.

Finally, people often request papers via Researchgate even though the PDF is already discoverable via Google Scholar. This is annoying since you usually can't legally host your paper there. But what you can do is create a redirect document in Word and save to pdf, and host that redirect document in Researchgate (e.g. see this example I made). That way it shows up as 'full text available' and people click through to the paper.

Of course, none of this ensures that your paper will be clearly written and compelling, but hopefully you're all over that, right?