“In the first section of this 1-hour webinar, Sebastian Bock, Senior Product Manager in the Product & Platform Group at Springer Nature, will introduce details concerning the finalized agreement between Springer Nature and ResearchGate. In the second section guest speaker Michael Häusler, Head of Engineering Architecture at ResearchGate, will explain the technical aspects of the Springer Nature partnership with ResearchGate including data exchange, authentication and authorization processes. Sebastian will finish with a look at Springer Nature processes to support the agreement including a look at COUNTER 5 usage statistics reporting.”
Category Archives: oa.researchgate
Role of social networking services for scientists in promoting scientific output on example of Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences | Emerald Insight
Abstract: Purpose
This paper aims to answer the question of how the Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences communicate the most recent scientific findings in the media space, i.e. what types of publications are shared, what activities do they exemplify (sharing information about their own publications, leading discussions, formulating opinions), what is the form of the scientific communication created by them (publication of reference lists’ descriptions, full papers, preprints and post prints) and what is the audience reception (number of downloads, displays, comments).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors present the results of analysis conducted on the presence of the most recent (2017–2019) publications by the Polish representatives of the widely understood social communication and media sciences in three selected social networking services for scientists: ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Academia.edu. The analyses covered 100 selected representatives of the scientific environment (selected in interval sampling), assigned, according to the OECD classification “Field of Science”, in the “Ludzie nauki” (Men of Science) database to the “media and communication” discipline.
Findings
The conducted analyses prove a low usage level of the potential of three analysed services for scientists by the Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences. Although 60% of them feature profiles in at least one of the services, the rest are not present there at all. From the total of 113 identified scientists’ profiles, as little as 65 feature publications from 2017 to 2019. Small number of alternative metrics established in them, implies, in turn, that if these metrics were to play an important role in evaluation of the value and influence of scientific publications, then this evaluation for the researched Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences would be unfavourable.
Originality/value
The small presence of the Polish representatives of the communication and media sciences in three analysed services shows that these services may be – for the time being – only support the processes of managing own scientific output. Maybe this quite a pessimistic image of scientists’ activities in the analysed services is conditioned by a simple lack of the need to be present in electronic channels of scientific communication or the lack of trust to the analysed services, which, in turn, should be linked to their shortcomings and flaws. However, unequivocal confirmation of these hypotheses might be brought by explorations covering a larger group of scientists, and complemented with survey studies. Thus, this research may constitute merely a starting point for further explorations, including elaboration of good practices with respect to usage of social media by scientists.
Improving access and delivery of academic content – a survey of current & emerging trends | Musings about librarianship
“While allowing users to gain access to paywalled academic content aka delivery services is often seen to be less sexy than discovery it is still an important part of the researcher workflow that is worth looking at. In particular, I will argue that in the past few years we have seen a renewed interest in this part of the workflow and may potentially start to see some big changes in the way we provide access to academic content in the near future.
Note: The OA discovery and delivery front has changed a lot since 2017, with Unpaywall been a big part of the story, but for this blog post I will focus on delivery aspects of paywalled content. 1.0 Access and delivery – an age old problem
1.1 RA21, Seamless Access and getFTR
1.2 Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA)
1.3 Browser extensions/”Access Brokers” 1.4 Content syndication partnership between Springer Nature and ResearchGate (new) 1.5 Is the sun slowing setting on library link resolvers? 1.6 The Sci-hub effect?
1.7 Privacy implications …”
Gold, green, and black open access – Björk – 2017 – Learned Publishing – Wiley Online Library
“Key points
The debate about open access has until now focused on the gold (journals) versus the green route (manuscript self?archival).
Recently an even more disruptive form of OA has emerged, in the form of illegal article copies retrievable from academic social networks or pirate sites.
Illegal, or “black open access”, provides access to a large part of the pay?walled article output which cannot be found in repositories….”
The Springer Nature / ResearchGate partnership
“In March 2019, Springer Nature and ResearchGate entered a unique partnership to explore new ways for researchers to share content. The goal was to combine Springer Nature’s expertise in publishing high-quality research with ResearchGate’s online platform of millions of scientists, and deliver a better experience for the communities served by both organisations.
To evaluate the success of the partnership, we carried out an author survey of nearly 700 researchers after the first phase of the pilot partnership in April 2019. Following the second pilot phase, we also conducted in-depth interviews with librarians from North America and Europe. Furthermore, we analysed usage data of the content from Springer Nature that was syndicated to ResearchGate and compared authentication data from ResearchGate with that of Springer Nature. Having now entered a long-term content sharing partnership and we’re thrilled to share what we’ve learnt so far. This white paper informs you about:
How the unique partnership works and its goals
Benefits to researchers, authors, librarians and others identified so far
Areas for further analysis, discussion, and future developments….”
Syndication Success: A Report from the Springer Nature and ResearchGate Pilot – The Scholarly Kitchen
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Today, ResearchGate and Springer Nature are jointly announcing the findings of their syndication pilot. In this partnership, as we have previously analyzed, Springer Nature distributes the version of record of articles from several dozen journals to ResearchGate for access. Users with institutional entitlements can download the PDF, while other users are presented with a read-only version. Today’s white paper from the partners reports positive responses from authors and plan to transition this pilot into an ongoing service. From the publisher perspective, article usage is up and leakage is contained. And, ResearchGate, which added a partnership with Wiley during the Springer Nature pilot, emerges as a stronger identity and access platform and a potential counterweight to Elsevier….
The success of this pilot shows convincingly that we should anticipate future syndication partnerships — as the report itself states emphatically. We look forward to seeing which other publishers elect to syndicate their content to ResearchGate; we certainly expect to see Wiley do so before Elsevier! But equally, we await seeing whether publishers will begin to syndicate their content to any other scholarly collaboration networks, discovery services, courseware systems, research workflow tools, or other platforms. The details of such arrangements are likely to vary both across different types of publishers as well as different types of syndication platforms. Over time we expect to see a few predominant models and related standards and principles emerge. ”
Use of author identifier services (ORCID, ResearcherID) and academic social networks (Academia.edu, ResearchGate) by the researchers of the University of Caen Normandy (France): A case study
Abstract: The purpose of this paper was to assess the presence of researchers on two author identifier services (ORCID and ResearcherID) and to compare the results with two academic social networks (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) using the categories of discipline, career advancement, and gender in a medium sized multidisciplinary university in France (University of Caen Normandy). Metrics such as number of publications per researcher, h-indexes, and average number of citations were also assessed. Of the 1,047 researchers studied, 673 (64.3%) had at least one profile on the four sites, and the number of researchers having multiple profiles decreased as more sites were studied. Researchers with only one profile numbered 385 (36.8%), while 204 (19.5%) had two, 68 (6.5%) had three, and only 16 (1.5%) had four. ResearchGate had by far the highest number of researchers present, with 569 (54.3%), whereas presence on the other sites was about 15%. We found that, apart from Academia.edu, researchers in Sciences, Technology, and Medicine (STM) were over-represented. Overall, experienced male researchers were over-represented on the sites studied. Our results show that, because of the numerous profiles lacking publication references (particularly on ORCID) and a low presence of researchers on the four sites studied (except for ResearchGate), assessing the number of publications, h-indexes, or average number of citations per article of individuals or institutions remains challenging. Finally, our data showed that French researchers have not adopted the use of the two author identifier sites (i.e. ORCID and ResearcherID). As long as French researchers remain reticent, these sites will not be able to provide the services for which they were created: addressing the problem of author misidentification, consequently providing exhaustive access to scientific production and bibliometric indicators of individual researchers and their institutions.
Use of author identifier services (ORCID, ResearcherID) and academic social networks (Academia.edu, ResearchGate) by the researchers of the University of Caen Normandy (France): A case study
Abstract: The purpose of this paper was to assess the presence of researchers on two author identifier services (ORCID and ResearcherID) and to compare the results with two academic social networks (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) using the categories of discipline, career advancement, and gender in a medium sized multidisciplinary university in France (University of Caen Normandy). Metrics such as number of publications per researcher, h-indexes, and average number of citations were also assessed. Of the 1,047 researchers studied, 673 (64.3%) had at least one profile on the four sites, and the number of researchers having multiple profiles decreased as more sites were studied. Researchers with only one profile numbered 385 (36.8%), while 204 (19.5%) had two, 68 (6.5%) had three, and only 16 (1.5%) had four. ResearchGate had by far the highest number of researchers present, with 569 (54.3%), whereas presence on the other sites was about 15%. We found that, apart from Academia.edu, researchers in Sciences, Technology, and Medicine (STM) were over-represented. Overall, experienced male researchers were over-represented on the sites studied. Our results show that, because of the numerous profiles lacking publication references (particularly on ORCID) and a low presence of researchers on the four sites studied (except for ResearchGate), assessing the number of publications, h-indexes, or average number of citations per article of individuals or institutions remains challenging. Finally, our data showed that French researchers have not adopted the use of the two author identifier sites (i.e. ORCID and ResearcherID). As long as French researchers remain reticent, these sites will not be able to provide the services for which they were created: addressing the problem of author misidentification, consequently providing exhaustive access to scientific production and bibliometric indicators of individual researchers and their institutions.
Wiley Reaches Detente with Academic Social Network ResearchGate | Copyright and Technology
“Academic and scientific researchers have their own social networks. One of the biggest differences between these services and LinkedIn or Twitter is that researchers are interested in other researchers’ content as much as they are in social interactions. This has led academic social networks to find ways of getting users to post their papers and journal articles to the networks, in order to increase membership and traffic. The problem with this, of course, is that in many cases the researchers don’t own the copyrights–publishers do–and they don’t have permission to upload that content….
ResearchGate’s copyright hostilities with STM publishers began in 2017, when the publishers’ global trade association, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (also known, confusingly, as STM), sent it a letter threatening to sue. At the same time, five publishers formed an organization called the Coalition for Responsible Sharing (CfRS) with the sole purpose of addressing copyright issues on ResearchGate….
Wiley’s statement about the agreement is vague on details. But reading between the lines, it suggests that Wiley’s agreement goes somewhat beyond ResearchGate’s 2018 agreement with Springer Nature et al: ResearchGate has agreed to send its users detailed messages about the permissibility (or lack thereof) of content sharing, and to process Wiley’s takedown notices more aggressively and/or efficiently; while in return, ResearchGate will share some of its trove of content access data with Wiley and work to improve discoverability of content on the site. But the agreement does not call for ResearchGate to implement content recognition-based copyright filtering or facilitate incremental licensing revenue from authors….”
Copyright Compliance by ResearchGate Is the Only Viable Long-Term Solution — Coalition for Responsible Sharing
“The members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing have always been clear that we embrace and actively encourage copyright compliant sharing of content by the research community. However, the commercial science platform ResearchGate continues to provide access to millions of research articles on its site without publisher’s permission in contravention of copyright agreements and does not take any appropriate measures to stop this illicit activity.
On Wednesday, May 6, 2020, Wiley announced that it will explore other possibilities to minimize the availability of copyright infringing articles on ResearchGate and made the decision to enter into an agreement with ResearchGate. [Hence, Wiley has dropped out of CFRS].
“We appreciate the support Wiley has put into the Coalition for Responsible Sharing over such a long time,” says James Milne, PhD, chair of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing and president, ACS Publications. “Members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing continue to believe the illicit posting and subsequent removal of infringing content on ResearchGate’s site is unsustainable and disruptive for the research community. Copyright-infringing content should not be made available on ResearchGate’s site at any time.”
To date, cooperation agreements proposed by ResearchGate do not address the Coalition for Responsible Sharing’s concerns. New copyright-infringing articles are constantly being added to the site, in addition to the millions of copyright-infringing articles it already illicitly distributes. An average of 130,000 articles have continued to be added to ResearchGate each month, approximately 45 percent of which infringe copyright. To date, Coalition for Responsible Sharing members have sent nearly 450,000 takedown notices to ResearchGate for copyright infringing content it distributes….”
ResearchGate and Wiley announce cooperation agreement
“ResearchGate, the largest professional network for researchers, and Wiley, a global leader in research and education, today announced a cooperation agreement to explore ways in which Wiley and ResearchGate can collaborate to better support the needs of researchers through ResearchGate’s collaboration platform. Wiley and ResearchGate are committed to the protection of intellectual property rights for authors and publishers; and through this partnership, both companies will continue to support principled sharing of content while facilitating the discovery of and access to high-quality scholarly content for researchers….”
The Role and Utilization of International Academic Social Networks in Digital Publishing
Abstract : This paper focuses on the issue of academic social networks as means of changing the open access reality. Nowadays a free, direct and permanent access to digital scientific content is necessary for every student and researcher. The need for human communication has made social networks popular to the public, resulting in their rapid development, for example, ResearchGate and Academia.edu. The study is motivated by one main research question: What is their role and utilization in digital publishing? Through observational research and secondary quantitative and qualitative data analysis, the key objectives of the study are to highlight the role of international academic social networks in digital publishing and present the benefits and limitations of existing networks. In conclusion, the active use of academic social networks enables researchers to expand their knowledge but on the other hand limitations on digital publishing arise regarding to copyrights and licensing barriers.
The Role and Utilization of International Academic Social Networks in Digital Publishing
Abstract : This paper focuses on the issue of academic social networks as means of changing the open access reality. Nowadays a free, direct and permanent access to digital scientific content is necessary for every student and researcher. The need for human communication has made social networks popular to the public, resulting in their rapid development, for example, ResearchGate and Academia.edu. The study is motivated by one main research question: What is their role and utilization in digital publishing? Through observational research and secondary quantitative and qualitative data analysis, the key objectives of the study are to highlight the role of international academic social networks in digital publishing and present the benefits and limitations of existing networks. In conclusion, the active use of academic social networks enables researchers to expand their knowledge but on the other hand limitations on digital publishing arise regarding to copyrights and licensing barriers.
Staying with the Trouble: Designing a values-enacted academy | Impact of Social Sciences
“The prospecting practices of Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Academic Analytics reinforce precisely such an impoverished conception of scholarship. The data they collect and ‘insights’ they provide foster an “analytics mindset” and obsession with self-branding. Academic Analytics, for its part, mines a “mother lode” of scholarly data independent of input from the scholars themselves, and presents this data to institutions of higher education in ways that represent, repackage, and reduce the quality of scholarly merit primarily to the quantity of scholarship produced. This data- and metrics-driven framework enables inter-institutional competition that has helped to create a toxic culture of self-interest and prestige. …”
Staying with the Trouble: Designing a values-enacted academy | Impact of Social Sciences
“The prospecting practices of Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Academic Analytics reinforce precisely such an impoverished conception of scholarship. The data they collect and ‘insights’ they provide foster an “analytics mindset” and obsession with self-branding. Academic Analytics, for its part, mines a “mother lode” of scholarly data independent of input from the scholars themselves, and presents this data to institutions of higher education in ways that represent, repackage, and reduce the quality of scholarly merit primarily to the quantity of scholarship produced. This data- and metrics-driven framework enables inter-institutional competition that has helped to create a toxic culture of self-interest and prestige. …”