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In the last few months I’ve had a few
queries from academics about uploading their full text articles to ResearchGate
often prompted by them receiving an email saying 'Add full-texts to them to create exposure for your research'
. The
purpose behind this is of course increasing access to the research itself but
there are a few issues with this in ResearchGate
However first I must say that ResearchGate
is a great site and service, it brings together researchers from all areas of
science, ignoring institutional affiliations in the way that researchers and
science does. It links up researchers in other areas, provides with a good
‘home page’ , suggests other research they may be interested in, shows who else
they are working with and has ‘forums’ for discussion. It identifies your
papers for you and asks you just to confirm that and then for you to upload
your papers. At present it has 521 LSHTM staff registered on it (although how
many are active is another thing) and each day I get notificaton of new members
and more papers being added.
What can you upload to ResearchGate? Well
remember that in the majority of cases the copyright will have been transferred
from the authors to the publisher and as such only with specific permission can
you redistribute that research online. But there are many different versions of
research papers and different licenses, which allow different things.
Publisher
pdf version of record: If you have published with
Elsevier, Wiley, Cambridge, Oxford, Springer, Lippincott or most other traditional
publishers you cannot upload this.
Author
accepted manuscript (post-print): Many publishers
(though not Wiley) do allow this to be redistributed/hosted after an embargo
but only on your own institutional site and not for commercial use.
ResearchGate is a commercial site.
Paid
Open Access articles with PLoS and BioMed Central:
all these articles can be uploaded to ResearchGate and this is due to the fact
that they also will have a CC-BY license which allows commercial reuse.
Paid
Open Access articles with other publishers: This
will depend on what license has been applied, if you chose CC-BY then yes you
can upload this.
RCUKfunded articles: RCUK indicate that where a article
processing charge is paid it needs to be released under a CC-BY license which
would allow you to upload
So you can see it can be quite complicated
to work out and in fact restrictive and maybe this is why ResearchGate prefers
just to say ‘upload your full text’. Yet publishers have been pretty diligent
in telling institutional repositories such as ours what we can and cannot host
or distribute and we at LSHTM Research Online are very careful in ensuring we
don’t breach copyright. But sites such as ResearchGate and Mendeley have taken
a much more hands off approach to copyright and publishers have not really
questioned them.
Why is this? Well maybe publishers view such sites as future/potential
businesses. Recently Elsevier bought Mendeley and Bill Gates also invested $35min ResearchGate itself. The value in both of these sites are the researchers
themselves, they voluntarily provide huge amounts of data about themselves,
their research and associations. ResearchGate has been described as the
‘Facebook’ for scientists and Facebook’s value is all in the data that they
have gathered. So maybe publishers allows such sites to gather research papers
without questioning their ‘loose’ monitoring of copyright breaches since there
is another value and if the site gets enough academics and scientists
registering then buying them out is worth much more than stopping copyright breaches.
Whereas institutional repositories offer publishers nothing at all, all we try
and do in our own small way is to manage and control the research that our
academics and institutions produce and that is more of a threat than a social
media company that can eventually be bought.
