(1 June 2018) Oxford University Press has joined the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, an alliance of publishers and learned societies who are taking action against copyright infringement by ResearchGate. The Coalition for Responsible Sharing aims to prevent the illicit hosting of millions of subscription articles on the commercial ResearchGate site and offer alternative, sustainable solutions to help the research community share their published material online in useful and appropriate ways.
In joining the Coalition, OUP will serve legal takedown notices to ResearchGate for content that infringes its copyright licenses.
OUP is a strong proponent of broadening access to the research we publish in a sustainable manner and we do not take this action lightly. For the last two years, we have been working with other publishers through the STM Association in an attempt to find cooperative ways to work with scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs), including ResearchGate. Unfortunately, these attempts have, in this instance, been unsuccessful.
As a department of the University of Oxford, everything we publish underpins our mission: to support Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. As a press, we take pride in this mission, which allows us to enable, support, and facilitate research and scholarship. We believe that publishers and SCNs can and should co-exist to the benefit of the research community, with each respecting the other’s contribution to scholarly communications and will continue to work with researchers, SCNs, librarians, and others to improve access to journal articles in line with the rights of their authors and publishers and the interests of the entire research community.
Further information on our article reuse policies can be found on our Author Self-Archiving page.
The announcement is here.
