Should I send a "cease-and-desist" letter to ResearchGate?

Question

ResearchGate is pretty well placed on Google. But it does not have a lot of contents or active users, despite their constant invitation spam. So they spidered a lot of publications, and provide some metadata on publications and authors on their web page, even when you do not join.

Given the amount of spam I receive from them, I'm considering to file a cease-and-desist letter, disallowing them to use my name or work for advertising their service and for encouraging users to join their site, and instead display a clear statement that I am not a member and disable search indexing for these pages.

Currently, ResearchGate has a pretty bad reputation, see e.g. ResearchGate: an asset or a waste of time? as well as the Wikipedia article.

I'm really annoyed by them:

• They have a fake profile page with my name, affiliation, co-authors, publications, and a big "sign up" button; that does not state that I am not a member, as if they could contact me this way.
• They publish incomplete numbers of citations and impact, which one may consider to give me a bad reputation on their site. (I don't care, but this may be a legal point to make?)
• They have information pages of many of my articles, with a big "request full-text" button, which will not work, as I am not a member and do not get contact information.
• They use a proxy redirector to have their website show up first in Google search results, even when the actual contents are only available on a different website,

Do you think that it is detrimental for my career to have such contents removed (by sending a C&D letter to them), or do you think they will ultimately manage to become a useful platform, and then it would be better to not have my data removed? Even with a C&D, I could probably retract it at some point and join. After all, the real contents are available on my homepage and Google Scholar; and these are the locations I want to show up first (fortunately, most of the time, they do).

Answer 1

I am a law professor, and I am equally pissed with research gate.

It would be unwise and inappropriate to give you specific advice about your own situation: this would likely constitute the unauthorized practice of law; for actual legal advice about the claims and defenses and legal strategies that apply to your situation, consult a competent lawyer admitted to the bar in your jurisdiction. I will recount my own experiences below by way of generally informing the world what one person's approach is to one specific situation (i.e., mine).

That being said, here's how I've dealt with Research Gate. They committed four serious affronts against me:

1. Fraudulently inducing me to sign up for the site by sending invitations claiming to be from my coauthors,

2. Forging my name on e-mails to other people claiming that I invited them to sign up to the site

3. Posting a draft of a paper of mine without permission, and

4. Maintaining a profile of me on the site without permission. (This one, as others have noted, may not be illegal---I am not sure---though it is certainly offensive in context, and to the extent it involved misleading attributions of endorsement may be illegal.)

In response, after learning about 1, 2, and 4, I sent their customer service people a nastygram over e-mail demanding the forged emails stop and be unsubscribed. They sent me some useless response claiming I could unsubscribe. I thought nothing more of it, but continued to hear of forged emails.

I then discovered 3 via a google scholar alert and really blew my stack. So I contacted their general counsel, also listed as their contact for DMCA takedown notices and send them a DMCA takedown combined with an incredibly nasty cease and desist letter.

Their general counsel promptly replied and informed me that he'd taken down the paper referenced in #3 above. I haven't verified that this is true, or checked on any of the other ongoing acts of wrongdoing (the serial email forgery etc). I have some hopes that this will work, however, I am prepared to file suit against them on my own behalf should it not.

What can others learn from my experience? It's not clear yet. I am of the opinion that this company operates by massive fraud and needs to be put down, but if my attempt to menace them into acting a little more law-abiding at least with respect to me succeeds, it may only be because I'm a law professor and they know that it would not be hard for me to drag them to account.

Of the various wrongs they inflict on the world, the posting of unauthorized copies of papers is the easiest to stop---the DMCA is a blunt instrument, and, moreover, the publishers also have an incentive to put a stop to this. The next time I see a paper of mine on their site, I may not even going to bother with doing my own DMCA, instead just turning it over to the publisher.

The rest? As I said, for myself personally, if the forged emails don't stop I may go looking for a class action plaintiff's lawyer, or just file seeking an injunction myself.

But otherwise, the best choice may be prevention. Don't sign up for their site. Tell your friends not to sign up for their site. Let people know if emails inviting them to do things on that site show up under their name. Publicize their practices so that others stay away from them. Starve the beast.

Answer 2

In the US a cease and desist letter does not do what you think it does. C&Ds are outside the usual legal process and serve as a warning to the recipient that you might sue them. Good ones describe in some level of detail the legal wrongs that the recipient has perpetrated against you and spell out the sender's plan to sue if the recipient does not cease and desist from the wrongful activity. They are a prelude to legal action and have no force of law in themselves.

I'm not sure that everything that ResearchGate is doing is legal. They may be contributing to copyright infringement by encouraging their users to post full-text copies of articles that neither ResearchGate nor the authors have license to post. However, I don't think making a stand-in profile page for a non-member is a crime or a tort. They seem to be trying to post true facts about you and your work to the best of their knowledge, which isn't illegal. It may turn out that their citation counts are wrong, but I bet that many such services (Google Scholar, Web of Science, etc) have errors in their databases. A factual error about you is typically not something you can sue over, especially when they've given you the opportunity to help fix their database by making an account.

Finally, getting litigious about their site is likely to lead to others discovering that you threatened ResearchGate. Due to the Streisand Effect, sending them a C&D letter or suing them is likely to do your career more harm than if ResearchGate had complied with your wishes.

I think that most people who care about your citation counts and published papers understand that ResearchGate is of low quality on these metrics so far. They will compare their results to other services and use the results that make the most sense to them. I think you're probably much better off either ignoring ResearchGate or joining up. Though, I wouldn't post any articles for which you lack either the copyright directly or the license to post freely from the current copyright holder.

Answer 3

Do you think that it is detrimental for my career to have such contents removed (by sending a C&D letter to them), or do you think they will ultimately manage to become a useful platform, and then it would be better to not have my data removed?

Clearly, one can only speculate, but given their current track record I would not hold my breath. I think the danger of real career detriments due to not being on RG are currently so small that this factor can probably be ignored in your decision making. And, as you say, opting in later on will likely not be a problem.

That being said, for me personally just sending them a C&D letter and making sure it is enforced would probably not be worth the effort. They are operated out of Berlin, so I am not sure whether US law (I am assuming that you are US-based) applies. Trying to go through international law to make them remove your data seems like a lot of hassle to me. Most importantly, your point:

they publish incomplete numbers of citations and impact, which one may consider to give me a bad reputation on their site.

is maybe too paranoid. Many, many places maintain publication and citation indices of authors, and practically none of them actually have all your citations in place. I think nobody who has any impact on your career would stumble over your machine-generated RG profile and assume that it is necessarily the complete truth.

Answer 4

In the terms and conditions, they state the following:

ARTICLE 4: NOTICE AND TAKE DOWN

If a user feels that any information provided within the Service infringes his/her or any third party's rights, he or she shall notify the Provider before taking any legal action.

Upon such notification, the Provider will expeditiously check the objectionable information and will, where necessary, remove or disable access to this information ("notice and take down" process).

The Provider will respond to any such notification within two business days.

Users shall not take any legal action before the Provider has dismissed the notification or two business days have elapsed without response.

The Provider disclaims liability for expenditures, including court and lawyer fees, if legal action is taken earlier, unless the Provider has caused the infringement intentionally, recklessly or negligently.

There is a contact form with an option for "Legal and Data Protection". You could try that as a first step.

Answer 5

Yes, unless you have a clear and quantifiable rational for explaining a future PI or research associate why you were driven to use legal means rather than negotiate.

In your professional life you have to push your personal research agenda through myriads of (small) political hurdles, in the long run your reputation is a two-sided coin. It does you no good to be a stellar researcher if you cannot work smoothly with others (teamwork is the Hallmark of 21st century research) and just working with others without inventing new paradigms will not make you a stellar reputation.

ResearchGate is free and they by and large try to help people, so I think your question is a red-hearing. I would say go back to work and make a name for yourself.