ResearchGate is a Scholarly Collaboration Network (SCN) that illicitly hosts, distributes and modifies scholarly articles. It distributes final, published articles in contravention of agreements between journals and authors, collects articles in an unauthorized way and makes them freely available via its site, and where corrections or retractions are issued, it fails to update articles accordingly on its site, undermining research integrity.
Following numerous unsuccessful attempts to agree on an amicable solution with ResearchGate, an alliance of information analytics businesses, publishers and learned societies is now left with no other choice but to resort to formal means to stop ResearchGate’s damaging practices.
Members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing include: the American Chemical Society, the American Medical Association, the American Physiological Society, the American Society of Plant Biologists, Atlantis Press, BMJ, Brill, Elsevier, Future Science Group, IEEE, IWA Publishing, KeAi Publishing, Portland Press (wholly-owned by the Biochemical Society), Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, and World Scientific Publishing. Since October 2017, several of these organizations have issued take down notices to ResearchGate.
Concurrently, the American Chemical Society and Elsevier have asked the courts to clarify ResearchGate’s copyright liability. The trial started with a public hearing on 18 April at the Munich Regional Court (Germany).