This guide contains advice and tips for making sure your research is available as widely as possible.
First, publish your work as open access
There are many good reasons to publish open access. When you do this, more people will have access to your work. This has been verified in several studies.
In addition, your rights as an author will ideally not be transferred to a publisher. So your work can be published in a repository (depending on the license chosen).
Additionally, open access publications have the potential to be cited more frequently.
Next, keep in mind that the world of scholarly communication is constantly changing.
For some interesting details about this, see this article by two librarians from Utrecht University Library:
Consider quality criteria
If you are planning to publish your work in a repository, make sure that the repository complies with quality criteria. Use repositories mentioned in Registry of Research Data Repositories.
Methods to check your visibility
One method is by the use of alternative metrics. These non-traditional metrics (such as h-index or journal impact factor) come from the field of bibliometrics. Alternative metric providers also describe other metrics, such as how often an article was tweeted and in which geographical region of the world. Some service companies are:
Methods to show your output
The classical way to show research output in the Humanities and Social Sciences has been with journal articles or books. In recent years, electronic formats have become important as well. Open Access publishing as part of the Open Science movement became mandatory for the results of research projects.
Depending on the contract between the author and the publisher, self-archiving of scholarly publications in institutional repositories is allowed.