ResearchGate and Academia are academic social networking sites rather than subject or institutional repositories and do not meet Research England's technical standards and requirements for open access.
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 they do not allow authors to meet open access requirements.
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 BRAD so they can be archived in BURA in line with REF requirements and technical standards.