Scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs) are top of mind these days for publishers and academic societies. One such network is ResearchGate. A new alliance of publishers, called the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, is taking steps to address widespread distribution of published articles in violation of copyright. For this article, I spoke with James Milne, Senior Vice President at the American Chemical Society (ACS) and chair of the Coalition.

ResearchGate is a for-profit undertaking, with reportedly more than $85M in funding from venture capitalists and other high profile investors. It is arguably the most popular SCN, likely due to an aggressive and very successful program of email marketing. The slide below, from a presentation by Philip Carpenter (John Wiley & Sons) given at the Academic Publishing in Europe Conference (APE) earlier this year in Berlin, offers a sense of the enormous traffic levels ResearchGate sees, more than even the largest of scholarly publishers (and close to 7X that of Sci-Hub):
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THE (05/10/17) Publishers seek removal of millions of papers…