ResearchGate and ACS & Elsevier have settled the copyright lawsuits the publishers filed in Germany and the US.
The gist of the settlement:
At the point of upload, the ResearchGate platform will check rights information for ACS and Elsevier published content. ResearchGate will then immediately determine how the content can be shared on its site. Authors can store their copyrighted ACS and Elsevier published Version of Record articles privately in their ResearchGate profiles and share them privately when requested by other users. The platform also identifies articles that may be shared publicly.
http://www.responsiblesharing.org/2023-09-15-acs-elsevier-and-researchgate-resolve-litigation-with-solution-to-support-researchers/
I feel a certain pain in using the name for the litigation group, “Coalition for Responsible Sharing”, which is aimed at scientific, medical, and academic research, largely publicly funded and supported. The promise of publication was to share it with the world, in the most expedient ways possible at the time. That was responsible sharing. Now “responsible sharing” means “share only so long as large profit-seeking entities can also free-ride on the work of scientists and scholars, and the financial support of the public.
It’s also painfully Orwellian, since the object of the group is obfuscated — it’s not “sharing”, it’s what the group means by “responsible”, i.e., again, for purposes of publisher profit.
“Coalition for Responsible Sharing”: The Coalition for Responsible Sharing (CfRS) is a group of publishers working together to bring the practices of article-sharing platforms and scholarly collaboration networks into compliance with copyright for the benefit of curated and certified science.
http://www.responsiblesharing.org/
Their self-description has a couple of tells; the word “compliance”, which isn’t a word one associates with knowledge or democracy. And, the (again, hiding the ball) phrase “benefit of curated and certified science”. It’s not the benefit of science. It’s the benefit of “curated and certified science”, which is to say, “the benefit of curators and certifiers.”
Aside from my lamentations about Orwell-speak, I am very curious to know how ACS and Elsevier plan to implement changes to author contracts. Is the database or API that they provide for ResearchGate going to account only for publisher-paid gold access? Or will it also account for the rights reserved by campus open access policies or negotiated exceptions to agreements? Will we see authors continuing to have to fight publishers to acknowledge the rights that the authors actually retained (as we have seen with, e.g., SSRN)? Will there be a YouTube-like appeals process for uploading authors to aver that they in fact do have the rights to their own content?
Hmm.