Sharing via scientific collaboration networks | American Institute of Physics

" ... With the widespread availability of photocopy machines, authors could replicate this process arbitrarily; readers could also make personal copies from the volume of the journals held by their institutional library. Such replication at modest levels is typically viewed by scholarly publishers as manifestations of the “fair use” provisions under US copyright law (Sect. 107) and similar international equivalents. Most scholarly publishers are comfortable with such sharing practices as long as they don’t encroach upon the boundaries of fair use, such as repackaging articles for resale, or, in the case of some publishers, posting the publisher’s final version on widely available institutional websites. The practice of article sharing became a much simpler task with online publishing—a simple keystroke can send copies to thousands of readers. A new tool that has appeared over the last decade has made the practice of article sharing even simpler and more useful for the researcher—the advent of article sharing networks. The best known of these networks are very successful start-ups in terms of the number of users, ResearchGate (6 million members) and Academia.edu (30 million monthly visitors). These networks solicit researchers to establish collaboration networks and give users capabilities to upload versions of their articles to be shared with user-defined collaboration groups and, in some cases, members of the public. These networks are becoming an increasingly popular means of article sharing and represent the latest incarnation of this important means of researcher collaboration. For this reason the scholarly publication community needs to support this new venture, but in a way that allows the practice to evolve as a useful tool without undue harm to the enterprise that published the article ..."