Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press, Thieme and ResearchGate announce new cooperation to make it easier to navigate the legal sharing of academic journal articles

Created: 24 April 2018

New York/Stuttgart – In a cooperation agreement announced today, three publishers and ResearchGate will work together on the sharing of articles on the scholarly collaboration platform in a way that protects the rights of authors and publishers. The agreement ultimately involves publishers who want to help and support content sharing and believe that working with ResearchGate, the largest professional network for scientists and academics, is one of the important means to achieving this.

As part of the agreement:

• ResearchGate and publishers will cooperate in educating users about their rights in relation to copyright-protected content by providing users with more and better information about how and when they may share their journal articles on the network
• ResearchGate will continue to promptly remove copyright-infringing content when alerted by publishers
• Publishers will get better visibility into the usage of new content on the platform that was originally published in their journals

This agreement is the culmination of discussions between publishers and ResearchGate announced last autumn. It shows that cooperation on the sharing of publisher content can be found and demonstrates the commitment from all parties to ensuring researchers are able to access and share high quality scholarly research responsibly.