ISTOCK, PERE_RUBIClarification (November 10): The 1.7 million figure cited in this article was first published on Twitter on November 1 by Nature's Richard Van Noorden following a phone conversation with CRS spokesman James Milne. This figure was also cited by Nature on November 8.
The academic social network ResearchGate has taken moves to restrict access to at least 1.7 million scholarly articles following threats of legal action by a coalition of publishers including Elsevier and the American Chemical Society (ACS), Times Higher Education reports today (November 9). The change, which follows months of conflict between the organizations, means that papers once freely available to download now have to be requested directly from their authors.
“ResearchGate’s primary service is taking high-quality content written and published by others and making as many as 7 million copyrighted articles—40% of its total content—freely available via its for-profit platform,” the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, a collaboration formed between ACS, Brill, Elsevier, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, writes in a statement published on October 5. “Numerous attempts to agree with ResearchGate on amicable solutions . . . remained unsuccessful. Members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing are therefore now resorting to formal means to alter ResearchGate’s damaging practices.”
On October 6, two of the Coalition’s members—Elsevier and ACS—filed a lawsuit in Germany to prevent the Berlin-based paper-sharing site from hosting copyrighted material in the future. Around the same time, an initial batch of “take-down notices” was ...
