Users of ResearchGate, the scholarly social networking site, may notice that articles they’ve posted are no longer available. This may be due to legal action taken by the Coalition for Responsible Sharing – a  group of major academic publishers including the American Chemical Society, Brill, Elsevier, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer. Coalition members have recently begun issuing takedown notices to ResearchGate asking the network to stop the “illicit dissemination” of articles published in their journals, saying that the publishers hold copyright to these works.

The takedown notices are the latest development in ongoing negotiations aimed at resolving publishers’ concerns with ResearchGate’s copyright violations.

While the Coalition is targeting ResearchGate, not individual authors, you may still be interested in learning more about these issues and their implications for scholarly publishing.

You may be also interested in how to share your work legally via open access platforms such as the Brock Digital Repository.

The Brock Library provides support with these issues via Liaison Librarians and others with expertise in scholarly publishing issues including Scholarly Communication Librarian Elizabeth Yates and Brock’s Legal Advisor Research and Copyright, Jordan Snel.