Academic social networking sites like ResearchGate and academia.edu are peer to peer sharing platforms which do not meet Research England's technical standards for institutional or subject repositories and open access policy requirements.
In many cases, there may be copyright restrictions on uploading papers to these sites and some publishers do not allow or encourage it. As such making papers available here may help make research more visible, but do not meet the deposit, access and discoverability requirements under the REF open access policy.
Personal websites, even where hosted by an institution, also do not meet the policy's open access technical standards.
While some subject repositories fall within the scope of the policy, a definitive list of acceptable subject repositories is not provided, therefore, it is vital that staff authors deposit newly accepted papers in so they can be archived in BURA in line with REF requirements and technical standards.