Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. Lisa is the Professor/Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library and an affiliate faculty member in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She served as the 2010-2011 President of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

ResearchGate is under assault. As a scholarly collaboration platform that enables both public and private sharing on a networked scale, ResearchGate is seen as dangerous, not only because it is potentially infringing copyright, but because it is doing so on a massive publisher-independent scale. A group of publishers tried to tame ResearchGate through a proposal that it endorse the STM Voluntary Principles on Article Sharing on Scholarly Collaboration Networks and implement antipiracy measures, but ResearchGate rejected this proposal. Though ResearchGate now faces the threat of thousands of takedown notices and a lawsuit, it is positioned to emerge at least unscathed, if not strengthened, from these assaults.
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I’ve documented the timeline and major activities of #ResearchGateGate elsewhere. Now, I’d like to draw out possible inferences and implications for the future of ResearchGate in particular and the state of scholarly sharing more generally. My analysis here is informed by an interview with James Milne, Chair of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing (conducted on October 18) as well as my own experiences as a scholar with a profile on ResearchGate and as a librarian who teaches the “Manage Your Online Scholarly Identity to Maximize the Reach and Impact of Your Work” workshop at my university.
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