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Comment by luxuryballs | Hacker News Reader

I’m out of the loop on researchgate, when you say “No need” is it like an archive.is? Why is it less desirable or, if I’m reading your tone correctly, a “backup option”?

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I'm a bit of a scholarly infrastructure purist. The paper has a DOI, it leads to a landing page that has the full text, and the content is open licensed.

Like if someone posted a link to an archive.is version of a Wikipedia page, you'd probably prefer to get the canonical link to that content.

ResearchGate is a bit of commercial enclosure of infrastructure that is, and should be, open. Who knows, maybe it has other value. I'm not an academic so I don't know.

My position is that when it’s open access, we might as well link the primary source. ResearchGate is generally legal. It’s the responsibility of the authors to upload accepted manuscripts if the final document is not open access. AFAIK it does not do anything dodgy like archive.is does.

They're a user hostile attempt to extract money from people. They make their website hard to use.

How so? I am not paying anything and I don’t have any problem getting full texts when the authors uploaded them. In fact, I just logged in and don’t see even the possibility to pay for anything there. I assume they monetise their database, but everything there is supposed to be publicly accessible anyway.

If I am not mistaken we can get documents without an account as well, unlike others.

If the original is available, posting anything else is by definition less desirable.

ResearchGate isn't open access.

How so? I don't have an account but I am able to read the entire paper directly from the OP's link, is there some sort of free limit or something that I have yet to hit? I get some banner ads served on their site but I'm not seeing how it isn't open access.

Researchgate has nothing to do with OA. Its a social media page for researchers. OA is open licensing that give the reader the rights to download, distribute, etc.

You may be arguing that ResearchGate allows free access to its articles in general. If so, I believe there's a logical fallacy in your argument. But I've been warned that naming that logical fallacy is a ban-able offense on HN. (Surreal but true.)

Ah, gotcha - yes that explains my misunderstanding. I was equating "open access" to free access to the content via website. Thanks for clarifying.

Some content on ResearchGate can be downloaded for free. Some can't.

ResearchGate isn’t a journal, right? I think it is some sort of… pseudo-social-networking site for papers.

Right, it's not a journal.

The researchgate link has for me a deceptive ad at the bottom: it has a PDF logo and says "download now", suggesting that this will download the paper. It then links to a download page which in the fine print says it will actually download some kind of ebook collection which costs 30 bucks per month. That's a scam.

As far as I understand this is a pre-print under CC-BY license, if this answers your question?

The clue is in the name, research "gate"

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