ResearchGate became the busiest social network for scientists, and one of the most irritating
A virologist started ResearchGate in Boston in 2008, and it soon moved to Berlin with backing from Benchmark, Peter Thiel's fund and Bill Gates. Scientists flocked to it to share papers and trade questions. Many also grew to resent its automated emails, sent in their names to co-authors who never asked for them.
Ijad Madisch founded the company with the physician Sören Hofmayer and the computer scientist Horst Fickenscher, and still runs it. The site began bare and grew features according to what researchers asked for. Membership jumped from 25,000 in 2009 to more than a million by 2011, and passed 17 million by 2020, most of them in medicine or biology and concentrated in Europe and North America. The New York Times summed it up as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn rolled into one.
Anyone can read the papers, but joining requires an email address at a recognised institution or manual confirmation as a published author. Members upload articles, datasets, negative results and code, follow topics, and send questions to others who list the matching expertise. That gatekeeping may explain an odd comparison: in 2016 Academia.edu had roughly 34 million registered users against ResearchGate's 11 million, yet ResearchGate saw far more active use. A Times Higher Education survey of 20,670 people found 61 percent of those with a publication had a profile, although many treated it as little more than an online CV.
Criticism has been steady. Invitations appeared to come personally from colleagues until the practice was reportedly dropped in November 2016; one study found a dormant account sent 297 invitations to 38 people in 16 months. A separate analysis suggested more than half the uploaded papers infringed copyright because authors posted the publisher's version, and Elsevier and the American Chemical Society sued before settling in September 2023. The proprietary RG Score, introduced in 2012, drew doubts about its method and was scrapped after July 2022.
Madisch has pitched targeted advertising as the business model, imagining readers clicking a microscope named in a paper to buy it. Staff grew from 12 in 2011 to about 300 by 2016, while losses rose from 5.4 million euros in 2014 to 6.2 million in 2015. Libraries cancelling costly journal bundles have cited the site's popularity as one reason subscriptions looked less essential.
Source: ResearchGate
