Publishers settle copyright infringement lawsuit with ResearchGate

After years of litigation, two prominent scientific publishers have settled copyright infringement lawsuits  with the academic social networking site ResearchGate. The agreement, the specific terms of which are being kept confidential, allows authors who have published research articles in American Chemical Society (ACS) and Elsevier journals to share their work on the ResearchGate platform in a copyright-compliant way.

In 2017, the two publishers sued ResearchGate for allegedly violating US copyright laws, specifically relating to 50 research papers uploaded by users to the site. In a separate case in Germany, a district court in Munich ruled at the end of January 2022  that ResearchGate is responsible for scholarly papers uploaded to the site in violation of copyright law. However, that German court dismissed the damages claimed by Elsevier and the ACS, arguing that the publishers hadn’t proven that they had bought the licensing rights from all co-authors of the manuscripts in question. ResearchGate had appealed that ruling, while the US lawsuit was also ongoing until now.