ResearchGate is Hiding Open Access Articles | University Library

"Now, facing legal pressure from several publishers, it looks like ResearchGate is starting to abandon its role as a tool for circumventing paywalls. As many of the deposits on ResearchGate clearly violate the terms of the publishers’ policies, it’s not too surprising that the International Association of Scientific Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), Elsevier, American Chemical Society (ACS), and others are looking for ways to take articles down. However, as Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe describes, it is unsettling that ResearchGate (RG) has been so quiet. Given that RG sends me at least an email a day, one would think that they’d send some kind of heads up to their users about their plans. Instead, RG and Springer Nature have offered a press release hinting at a collaboration to find “solutions to sharing scientific journal articles online, while at the same time protecting intellectual property rights.” If you ask me, that doesn’t sound like ResearchGate thinks it can continue to let authors choose how to provide open access to their work."