Copyright Infringement in ResearchGate Self-archiving Feature

To investigate the extent to which ResearchGate members as authors of journal articles comply with publishers’ copyright policies when they self-archive full-text of their articles on ResearchGate.
A random sample of 500 English journal articles available as full-text on ResearchGate was chosen (using a two-step random sampling) and the information of the articles and their authors were collected from ResearchGate. Compliance of their full-text availability then was checked against journal publishers’ policy mentioned in journal’s site or SHERPA/RoMEO.
Of these, 64 (13.4%) were preprint, 26 (5.2%) were post-print and 407 (81.2%) were published (publisher) PDF. The key finding was that 40.2% out of 500 articles infringed the copyright and were non-compliant with publisher policy. Although social sciences had the smallest number of articles overall, their number of non-compliant articles was larger than those of other fields.
Most of non-compliance cases occur when authors use publishers’ PDF for archiving. Given that two-fifths of ResearchGate full-text articles are not aligned with publishers’ copyright policies, authors and ResearchGate need to pay more attention to the issue and take measures for copyright compliance.