You've received an intriguing e-mail with a subject line that reads something like this: "148 people recently read a paper you are mentioned in." Or you get a message telling you "A total of 63 papers on Academia.edu mention your name."
It sounds intriguing, but what is actually going on here?
Believe it or not, Web pages that generate these messages (particularly ResearchGate and Academia.edu) are commercial social networking sites designed for scientists and researchers to share their work and discover other researchers' works. They are kind of like a mashup of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, with a focus on published scholarship and a stated goal of connecting scholars with other researchers who have common research interests.
It is easy to confuse these types of "for-profit" commercial sites with an Open Access Repository run by a university, but they have major differences.
For details about Open Access see our Guide to Understanding Open Access and for a great perspective on the differences between research-focused social networking sites and Open Access Repositories read A social networking site is not an open access repository from the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of California.
What happens if you create an account on a for-profit social networking site in order to get the full text of an article that you just found through a Google search?
You will probably get the article you were after and may be able to connect with other like-minded researchers, but if you are not cautious you may become a part of the "product" as your name and credentials are used to market the site to other researchers.
As noted, ResearchGate (which claims to have 17 million users) has been criticized for emailing unsolicited invitations to the coauthors you name in the published works you put under your profile. After all, that's how YOU get such e-mails (when your colleagues listed you as a co-author). Some find it annoying that these emails seem like they were personally sent by peers, but were instead sent automatically...unless that user realized they needed to "opt out" of that feature when they registered.
Similarly, these sites are notorious for collecting user data, tracking user clicks and "commodifying" it in ways that are hard for busy researchers to understand or control. As Michigan State University professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes in her blog post Academia, not edu:
"The problem, of course, is that many of us face the same dilemma in our engagement with Academia.edu that we experience with Facebook. Just about everyone hates Facebook on some level: we hate its intrusiveness, the ways it tracks and mines and manipulates us, the degree to which it feels mandatory. But that mandatoriness works: those of us who hate Facebook and use it anyway do so because everyone we’re trying to connect with is there.... I’ve heard many careful, thoughtful academics note that they’re sharing their work there because that’s where everybody is."
Also problematic is the fact that these platforms encourage researchers to upload copies of publications that may be copyrighted to the publisher, which could make the person who uploads the copyrighted material (typically the author) liable for infringement. The study "Copyright compliance and infringement in full-text journal articles" found that more than half of the papers uploaded by authors infringed copyright, in many cases because the author uploaded the publisher's version of the work.
Despite such observations, many researchers believe sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu have some value.
The bottom line is that if the tactics of commercial social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn bother you, be just as cautious of sites that target academics in similar ways.
If you work for VDOT and you want a copy of a paper promoted on a site like ResearchGate or Academia.edu, you do not need to register in order to get the paper. You can always contact the library's document delivery service and we'll get you a copyright-compliant version of the work free of charge.
Additional Reading:
Review of ResearchGate: Pros and Cons and Recommendations (Jill Evans, Open Research Exeter)
The Convoluted Profits of Academic Publishing (Laura McKenna, The Atlantic)
