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By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Quicker and Easier Access to Research’
In academic and scholarly publishing, ResearchGate is known as a kind of social medium for researchers.
Based in Berlin, the ResearchGate platform, as we reported, was engaged with Wiley in 2021 in a pilot program.
Another program, GetFTR, derives its name—opaque to those who aren’t in this sector of the business—from the fuller form, Get Full Text Research.
It was developed by founding entities including Springer Nature, Wiley, Elsevier, and others. It now operates as a standalone entity, with partnerships including those three companies as well as Taylor & Francis, ACS Publications, the American Meteorological Society, Atypon, the University of Edinburgh Press, the Rockefeller University, and more.
Public relations support is provided to GetFTR by Springer Nature, and that is the channel through which today’s news (May 8) has been directed to Publishing Perspectives. Get Full Text Research, or GetFTR, is a free-to-use directory of sorts, a way for researchers to find published scholarly work they’re looking for.
In recent months, Springer Nature’s communications team tells us, GetFTR “has been building—and ResearchGate has been testing—a new opt-in service that provides a faster way “to check entitlement information between publishers, ‘academic discovery’ services such as ResearchGate.”
Publishers opting in to this “integrated service offering” are able to manage their entitlement information in content syndication arrangements. GetFTR is in talks with other discovery and reading platforms to extend the offering.
Mathias Astell
In a prepared comment, Mathias Astell, ResearchGate’s product vice-president, is quoted, saying, “GetFTR has gone from strength to strength since its launch three years ago.
“With our aligned commitment to enabling quicker and easier access to research, working with GetFTR to deliver this new service enables us to facilitate greater access to high quality research content for our 25 million researcher users, both on- and off-campus.
“This service will also increase the reach and accessibility of the content our publisher partners share through the network. All our publisher partners will soon be able to benefit from this service and we look forward to working with them on this.”
Dianne Benham
And Dianne Benham, product director for GetFTR, speaks of working with ResearchGate “to support content syndication arrangements for those publishers who wish to use the service.
“It speaks directly to our goal of enabling improved discovery and streamlined access to trusted scholarly content,” she says.
“We have valued ResearchGate and Springer Nature’s expertise as we have developed and tested this new service, and look forward to working with additional partners.”
As this news is sent to us, it’s reported that more than 18 million researchers are using ResearchGate, which had its inception in 2008. Its work is supported by advertising and scientific recruitment.
More from Publishing Perspectives on academic and scholarly publishing is here, more from us on open access is here, more on ResearchGate is here, more on Wiley is here, more on Springer Nature is here, and more on Elsevier is here.