Hello,
For several months, hundreds of full text publications have been
duplicated from our Institutional Repository to ResearchGate
(http://www.researchgate.net).
Most repositories seem affected. If you tag the documents loaded into
your repository, you can easily find the documents duplicated from your
repository with the following URL (replace the XXXXXXX by the tag value
or the name of your university):
http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&as_q=XXXXXXX&as_sitesearch=researchgate.net&as_filetype=pdf
It seems that ResearchGate harvests repository through OAI-PMH. Then,
when they detect a new full text document, they suggest to authors to
duplicate it on ResearchGate servers. To do so, it seems that they have
developed very efficient and easy-to-use tools to duplicate the full
text files from repositories. Maybe there are also some hidden ways: I
have asked a few scientists why they have duplicated the full text from
our Repository to ResearchGate. And none of them was aware of having
duplicated theirs full text publications.
I am worried about this massive duplication because :
- It will become very hard to remove or update a document in case of
errors in the documents,
- IR can lose WEB traffic because of ResearchGate (it does not seem the
case at the moment). While in the period of financial crisis, the WEB
traffic is one of the arguments used to justify the cost of maintenance
of our AI with our employers.
- This duplication is not profitable either to the visibility of
publications: it would have been preferable to create a backlink to the
AI copy rather than duplicate it.
- Each time a new full text is duplicated all co-authors seem to be
spammed to join ResearchGate (see : http://www.biostars.org/p/63561/)
- Incidentally some (most?) of these duplications are illegal because of
copyright on such material
- …
What do you think about ResearchGate full text duplication strategy? Do
you think IR should care about them?
Kind regards,
Fred
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