Over the course of this month, we’ve seen a good deal of news around sharing scholarly research on the ResearchGate platform.
October 6, 2017
- A new alliance of academic publishers formed the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, in order to combat the unauthorized distribution of published articles.
- Two of the Coalition’s members, Elsevier and the American Chemical Society, filed a lawsuit in German courts against the social networking site, ResearchGate, alleging that ResearchGate has committed copyright infringement on a widespread scale.
October 10, 2017
- The Coalition reported that ResearchGate removed a substantial number of articles from public view.
October 17, 2017
- The Coalition’s members sent formal take down notices to ResearchGate.
- American Chemical Society and the American Anthropological Association sent messages to their membership, assuaging fears of legal actions against authors specifically (ACS) and encouraging their authors to remove content from ResearchGate and instead to post content on a personal website or institutional repository (AAA).
As an author, all this news can be confusing and frustrating. You want to share your research with your colleagues in the space where they already are (i.e. ResearchGate). However, you want to ensure that access to those articles is lawful and not subject to take down. Often, you’ll post the final version of your article on a platform like ResearchGate without realizing that you don’t have the rights to post it.
To help alleviate some of the confusion, the Scholarly Communications Office has created an overview of your options when sharing your research online.
Learn more about how to share your research!