Syndication Success: A Report from the Springer Nature and ResearchGate Pilot - The Scholarly Kitchen

"   Tweet Share58 Pin1 Buffer3 Share 62SHARES  PRINT THIS PAGE Today, ResearchGate and Springer Nature are jointly announcing the findings of their syndication pilot. In this partnership, as we have previously analyzed, Springer Nature distributes the version of record of articles from several dozen journals to ResearchGate for access. Users with institutional entitlements can download the PDF, while other users are presented with a read-only version. Today’s white paper from the partners reports positive responses from authors and plan to transition this pilot into an ongoing service. From the publisher perspective, article usage is up and leakage is contained. And, ResearchGate, which added a partnership with Wiley during the Springer Nature pilot, emerges as a stronger identity and access platform and a potential counterweight to Elsevier.... The success of this pilot shows convincingly that we should anticipate future syndication partnerships — as the report itself states emphatically. We look forward to seeing which other publishers elect to syndicate their content to ResearchGate; we certainly expect to see Wiley do so before Elsevier! But equally, we await seeing whether publishers will begin to syndicate their content to any other scholarly collaboration networks, discovery services, courseware systems, research workflow tools, or other platforms. The details of such arrangements are likely to vary both across different types of publishers as well as different types of syndication platforms. Over time we expect to see a few predominant models and related standards and principles emerge. "