ResearchGate-gate isn’t quite as catchy as other scandals, but it is something we might be hearing more about in the future. A recent article published by Sarah Bond at
encouraged researchers to remove all of their articles from the for-profit company, Academia.edu. This has led to a wave of account deletions at the site, and also at ResearchGate, two sites dueling with each other to become the “Facebook for academics.” The issue Bond raises is this: Why should companies generate profits from research with little transparency? It’s a good question. This sounds suspiciously like the entire scholarly publishing ecosystem to me, and it is not clear why Academia.edu is in Bond’s crosshairs. For decades, for-profit companies have been making vast sums of money from researchers’ work, and often with profit margins in excess of 35 percent, greater than those even of Google (25 percent) Apple (29 percent) and even ...
