Publishers Elsevier and the American Chemical Society have alleged that the popular academic networking site, ResearchGate, has committed copyright infringement by sharing copyrighted research papers with their users, according to an article at www.sciencemag.org. ResearchGate claims more than 13 million users who can use personal pages to upload and share material including published papers or book chapters. These uploads, now comprising millions of works, are usually only accessible by paid subscription.
The suit comes after a group of publishers contacted ResearchGate, suggesting they implement an automated system that would help users of the site determine whether an article was protected by copyright and could be legally shared. After ResearchGate rejected this proposal and suggested that the publishers should send the company formal takedown notices instead, the publishers filed a lawsuit in a German regional court asking to clarify the legality of posting the articles.