Lisa Hinchliffe and Roger Schonfeld, in a Scholarly Kitchen post:
Today, ResearchGate and Springer Nature are jointly announcing the findings of their syndication pilot. […] Today’s white paper from the partners reports positive responses from authors and plan to transition this pilot into an ongoing service. From the publisher perspective, article usage is up and leakage is contained. And, ResearchGate, which added a partnership with Wiley during the Springer Nature pilot, emerges as a stronger identity and access platform and a potential counterweight to Elsevier.
The piece (“Syndication Success”) is weirdly puffy, and—in its claims about Elsevier—arguably misleading. The idea of ResearchGate as an identity-platform counterweight is not (as the article lead suggests) in the white paper, but instead speculation from Hinchliffe and Schonfeld.
Even if they’re right about ResearchGate, however, the cheerleading is a head-scratcher: How is a venture-backed, for-profit startup coming to own lots of crucial scholarly infrastructure anything but terrifying?