Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Services
  3. Open access policies
  4. Social sharing
  5. Social sharing FAQs

Cambridge University Press and ResearchGate

The last few years have seen academic publishers engaging with scholarly collaboration networks in various ways, trying to balance their popularity with authors and researchers against concerns over large-scale copyright infringement. Cambridge University Press, recently signed an agreement with ResearchGate to foster responsible sharing - see our joint statement here. 

These FAQs work to explain the approach that we have taken. If you have any additional questions or thoughts, please do let your CUP editor know or contact us via openaccess@cambridge.org.

FAQs

What is ResearchGate?

ResearchGate is a scholarly collaboration site where researchers can share and discuss their work, follow research topics, and pose and answer questions. ResearchGate was founded in 2008 by the physicians Dr. Ijad Madisch and Dr. Sören Hofmayer, along with computer specialist Horst Fickenscher. They have completed four rounds of financing from Benchmark, Founders Fund, Bill Gates, Tenaya Capital, Wellcome Trust, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, and Four Rivers Group.

Why has Cambridge joined with SpringerNature and others in signing a collaboration agreement with ResearchGate?

We support collaboration between researchers, including the sharing of articles. It is of course vital that any sharing is done responsibly and in accordance with our Green OA and sharing policies – without this, the viability of many of our journals could be at risk. 

Many of the articles in ResearchGate have been posted in breach of publishers’ policies or authors’ agreements with their publishers. Most authors don’t realise that they should not post articles in this way: their goal is to disseminate their work and collaborate with other scholars. However, given the size of ResearchGate, this has the potential to undermine our subscription business and the sustainability of our society partners. 15 million researchers have made more than 215 million connections on the network. The Coalition for Responsible Sharing estimates that there are approximately 4 million infringing articles on the site, as of April 2018. We therefore want to work with ResearchGate to minimise the inappropriate posting of content and to provide authors with easy access to information about what they can legitimately post. 

This agreement forms just one part of the Press’s approach, alongside the launch of Cambridge Core Share, a tool that enables authors and readers to easily generate a link to an online, read-only journal article, and our Green Open Access policies. See our social sharing page for more information about responsible sharing.

How will this agreement help authors to post articles on ResearchGate responsibly?

This agreement provides both more visibility for publishers into the content posted to ResearchGate and more guidance for users of ResearchGate about how to post within the limits of our policies and copyright law. CUP will be able to crawl the ResearchGate site to locate infringing content and will pass instructions on to ResearchGate, ultimately directing authors to a page on our own site with CUP-specific information. The intention is that a combination of monitoring infringing content and working with authors will help foster a culture of responsible sharing. 

Why hasn’t Cambridge taken legal action against ResearchGate, like some other publishers?

We want to support open research and collaboration; we therefore prefer to work with rather than against organisations like ResearchGate that provide resources for open research and legitimate sharing. Scholarly collaboration networks also help make content more discoverable and can help with the dissemination of content. 

What do I need to do if I am an author and want to share my work?

There are a number of ways in which you can share your work responsibly: 

  1. 1. You can post a link to the final published version of your work.
  2. 2. Our Green Open Access policies allow you to post a version of your work in institutional repositories and other sites. Please see our full policies for journals, books and Elements. We don't normally allow final version PDFs of journal articles to be posted online or shared, and we encourage you to link to your work on Cambridge Core, which will allow us to track usage and provide you with more information about the impact of your work.
  3. 3. Use Cambridge Core Share, which allows you to create a link to a free-to-read version of your final published journal article. This tool is free to use for our authors and subscribers. 

If an author has chosen the open access option in my journal, can he/she upload the published article on ResearchGate?

Yes, Open Access content published under the appropriate CC-BY licences (or related) can be posted.  As ResearchGate is a commercial organization, those articles published under a non-commercial license (typically CC-BY-ND or CC-BY-NC-ND) would not fall into this category however. 

How can my journal take part in Cambridge Core Share if I am a journal editor or representative of a publishing partner?

We actively encourage every journal to participate, please contact your CUP editor to initiate the process. 

In what ways is Cambridge actively helping researchers to share their work responsibly? 

This agreement forms just one part of the Press’s approach, alongside the launch of Cambridge Core Share, a tool that enables authors and readers to easily generate a link to an online, read-only journal article, and our Green Open Access policies.

What will happen when the agreement expires?

The year-long term gives us a chance to learn from the data and to revisit the agreement. The agreement may then be extended or re-negotiated.