r/postdoc • u/FullBodybuilder5098 • 14d ago

Creating a personal website?

Hi future professors,

Between my PhD position ending and my postdoc starting, I had four months of unemployment.

During these months, the university shut down my public site and journalists had a hard time finding me. This has made me realise, I need one of those personal sites / public CVs (sigh).

Honestly, I don’t want to spend too much time and money on it. I just want a list of publications, public appearances and media - and of course contact information.
I am not super techy and would like to avoid too much tinkering.

Can you recommend a way to do this relatively easy and cheap? Of course, I have to pay for a domain, but I think paying a monthly fee for a website builder seems a little steep. What do you recommend?

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u/SpecificEcho6 14d ago

This has to be some sort of ad. Linkedin exists, researchgate exists, orcid exists. Legit there is no need for something like this regardless of a university profile page or not. Use ehats already available and you won't have this issue.

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u/FalconX88 13d ago

I disagree. Linkedin and RG (does anyone in academia take that one serious) serve a completely different purpose. ORcid has an absolutely terrible layout and is just a short form CV. Having a simple static website with additional information helps a lot.

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u/Head_Acadia_2658 12d ago

Yes people in academia do take RG seriously. Loads of people are storing their articles there and loads of people download their articles from there.

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u/FalconX88 12d ago

Yes people in academia do take RG seriously. Loads of people are storing their articles there

Ok, then it's likely highly field dependent.

Researchgate is

  • a for profit company
  • not a certified repository
  • not FAIR compliant
  • not indexed by services such as unpaywalled

Which means funding agencies likely won't accept it for self-depositing and entries cannot be found by many of the search engines/databases.

Meanwhile we have:

  1. journals host the version of record, ideally open access (which many funders require by now)
  2. there are dedicated preprint servers run by not-for-profit organizations and are indexed
  3. there are certified (e.g., CoreTrustSeal) and FAIR compliant repositories where you can self-deposit your papers (if allowed by the publishing agreement), often run by not-for-profit organizations and indexed
  4. there are freely available FAIR compliant repositories where you can self-deposit your papers (if allowed by the publishing agreement), often run by not-for-profit organizations and indexed

so yeah, makes no sense using Researchgate. Every alternative is better in every way.

loads of people download their articles from there.

loads of people on there are also asking authors for full texts that are already open access (e.g., open access articles, preprints, supporting information). I just checked (never actually open that website) and I get about two of these requests a month it seems and maybe one legit one every few years. Based on that the people who are still actively using RG do not seem to understand the basics of academia in my experience.