Penn State's open access policy, AC02, and the related guideline ACG02, do not take a position on the use of commercial academic social networks like ResearchGate or Academia.edu. However, posting a copy of a scholarly article on such a site does not satisfy the policy's requirements for making your article open.

Generally, publishers are more likely, in default publishing contracts, to permit authors to deposit their work in institutional repositories like ScholarSphere than on commercial sites. You may want to consider depositing your work in ScholarSphere and then linking to that copy from your social networking profile, if you use one.

With questions about the open access policy, please contact the Libraries' Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright.