ResearchGate is at the Epicenter of Legal Controversy, as Large Publishers Sue it over Copyright Infringements

[Dr. Pablo B. Markin]

Published Online: 2017-10-09
URL: http://openscience.com/researchgate-is-at-the-epicenter-of-legal-co...

While global publishing companies, e.g., Elsevier, Wiley and Brill, take ResearchGate to court over scientific article sharing, transition to Open Access can unshackle communication between scholars from legal constraints, due to its licensing conditions.

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Excerpt

As a blog post by Robert Harrington published on October 6, 2017, announces, the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, an umbrella organization uniting ACS Pubications, Brill, Elsevier, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer, has recently filed a lawsuit against Berlin-based ResearchGate on the grounds that the practices of this website serving the purpose of networking and collaboration among scholars, such as the distribution of scientific articles, violate copyright. At present, according to figures Harrington cites, ResearchGate is the most consulted website in the scientific community. As a startup company with multimillion venture capitalist funding, ResearchGate hosts articles that are both copyright-protected and materials and publications the sharing of which does not infringe on intellectual property rights of large publishers.

By Pablo Markin

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The full-length original blog article and additional resources can be found at OpenScience blog.