ResearchGate pulls 200,000 files from its site, amid publisher pressure

The academic social networking site ResearchGate has removed about 200,000 files from among the research papers it publicly shares, prompted by a spate of new copyright complaints from Elsevier and the American Chemical Society (ACS). ResearchGate, which is based in Germany and has more than 20 million users, says the majority of these files were Elsevier articles.

While requests to delete material from ResearchGate are not new, these most recent requests were notable because of the number of articles involved. ‘In the context of a community of over 20 million researchers this is unfortunate, rather than existential, but it has sparked an acute reaction from many of our members who believe in the importance of open science,’ ResearchGate stated in a 23 September blogpost.