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Who is the Coalition for Responsible Sharing?

The Coalition for Responsible Sharing (CfRS) is a group of publishers working together to bring the practices of article-sharing platforms and scholarly collaboration networks into compliance with copyright for the benefit of curated and certified science. The group was formed in October 2017 to engage with article-sharing platforms and scholarly collaboration networks and has since taken multiple steps to address the copyright-infringing dissemination of enormous amounts of published journal articles on the largest scholarly collaboration network, ResearchGate. Before that, several attempts to work jointly with ResearchGate to find ways for ResearchGate to run its service in a copyright-compliant way were unsuccessful.

Since its formation, the CfRS has grown to 13 society, not-for-profit and commercial publishers and information analytics businesses that are currently working together to implement a long-term viable solution that brings ResearchGate’s site into compliance with copyright and that meets the needs of all stakeholders.

The CfRS does not take action lightly and its measures are not directed at researchers. Members of the CfRS have always embraced and actively encouraged legitimate sharing of scientific articles by the research community. They have worked and will continue to work with key stakeholders in scholarly communications, including researchers, librarians, and other scholarly collaboration networks, to improve and innovate the process of article-sharing to better support the research community.

Latest News from the Coalition for Responsible Sharing

ACS, Elsevier, and ResearchGate: Joint Statement

ACS, Elsevier, and ResearchGate resolve litigation, with solution to support researchers ACS and Elsevier, members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, have agreed to a legal settlement with ResearchGate that ensures copyright-compliant sharing of research articles published with ACS or Elsevier on the ResearchGate site. The lawsuits pending against ResearchGate ...

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Coalition for Responsible Sharing: Statement

The Regional Court in Munich rules that ResearchGate is responsible for content illegally available on its site On 31 January 2022, the Regional Court in Munich confirmed that ResearchGate is responsible for content that is made available illegally on its site in contravention of agreements between publishers and authors. ResearchGate ...

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Coalition for Responsible Sharing statement on the EU Copyright Directive

Article 17 of the new EU Copyright Directive clarifies the responsibilities of all online platforms, such as ResearchGate, with respect to copyrighted content uploaded to their websites by their users and made available publicly. On 1 August 2021, this became German law that ResearchGate was required to implement. To comply ...

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Members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing

ACS
American Medical Association
American Physiological Society
American Society of Plant Biologists
BMJ
Brill
Elsevier
Future Science Group
IEEE
KeAi Publishing
Portland Press (fully-owned by the Biochemical Society)
Wolters Kluwer
World Scientific Publishing

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