It's been a while since we've talked about either ResearchGate or Academia.edu, though we know many of you use these services, both as readers and contributers (we do too). If you haven't yet stumbled across these two, they are online platforms on which researchers can post their papers. Academia.edu tends to be more humanities-focussed and is based in San Francisco and ResearchGate tends to be more STEM-focussed and is based in Berlin, but both of them host papers from all over the world and across all disciplines. These platforms position themselves somewhere between a research repository (other examples would be YSJ's RaY, SSRN, or arXiv) and a social networking site like LinkedIn or Facebook.
Though these services give users the ability to publicize and download
articles without paying a subscription or article charge, they're not providing open access in a responsible, sustainable manner. As we pointed out before, these platforms are owned by private companies and their goal is to create good financial returns for their investors. Mendeley, a socially-oriented citation management service, was purchased by Elsevier a few years back, and so it's possible that ResearchGate and Academia.edu will be sold to a similar (or the same) buyer in future. Another likely scenario is that they will sell onwards to marketers or R&D companies information about networks, research trends and other data you upload.
Providing open access to your research outputs is best practice, as well as making you compliant for the next REF. There are a number of accepted methods of making your work open access --YSJ's policy is to upload them to RaY -- but uploading to ResearchGate and Academia.edu are not acceptable for REF. You can continue to upload to either or both platforms, just remember to upload to RaY as well.
If you're interested in reading up on this, this blog posting by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, is a good place to start.
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