ResearchGate

[James Regan + 1,776]

Has anyone had any bad experiences with ResearchGate?

Looks like a Chinese hacking Mecca?

ResearchGate has also been criticized for failing to provide safeguards against "the dark side of academic writing", including such phenomena as fake publishers, "ghost journals", publishers with predatory manoeuvres and fake impact ratings.

It has also been criticized for copyright infringement of published works

https://www.researchgate.net

In order to gain access you must submit a thesis or report which then become their intellectual property.......

Edited August 17, 2019 by James Regan

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

That last paragraph is insightful. A colleague of mine took a contract with a Chinese company, in China, to design a methane hydrate well offshore.

When he arrived at the office in China they demanded to copy the hard drive on HIS laptop. Their reasoning was that since he was working for them and using his own laptop on the project, his laptop contents now belonged to them.

Somehow he avoided this issue, but I cannot remember the details.

As an aside, he designed a successful well, which they prosecuted. In the press release my colleagues name was never mentioned.

[Boat + 1,323]

Isn’t that the same world over? Billions of employees helping make incremental changes. Funny thing is as most management still would rather promote their own job rather than a coworker idea.

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

On 8/17/2019 at 4:33 PM, James Regan said:

In order to gain access you must submit a thesis or report which then become their intellectual property.......

This statement is incorrect. 

You can't login with a pseudonym and they ask what your research focus is, but that's entirely useful. I have multiple areas of interest and it automagically bubbles new papers in those categories to my home page on their site when I login. I follow several people and several follow me, it's very collegial without the kind of infighting you see in academia. I've collaborated with people across the globe I've never met and never would have met without the site. It's infinitely superior to the "journals" such as IEEE, or Nature who DO exercise copyright over YOUR paper you publish with them.