It was interesting to listen to Jaideep’s podcast about the Research Gate platform which is a social networking site for scientists and researchers for sharing papers, asking and answering questions, and finding collaborators.
It is similar to other Social Media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, where you can put your profile and have your network but it is designed for researches. You can invite people to join this platform.
It was designed very cleverly keeping in mind the user because you can have students and mentors so Academia can exploit it. Users get notified that their paper was viewed or downloaded x amount of times or that they were quoted.
They have created a Research Gate score which gives points for contribution to a discussion.
Although it has more of a younger audience, with PhD and Master’s students, they can invite their supervisors to it. So academics often join it because their students invite them. It is a great resource for people from around the world who don’t have access to copyright protected journals.
The Research Gate is interdisciplinary and you can see top downloaded papers from your organisation regardless of the subject. Jaideep gave an example when he looked at the top downloaded papers from Cambridge University and he was surprised to find out that people from other departments published papers in the fields which was relevant to his – the fact that he wasn’t aware of otherwise.
Jaideep said, he wasn’t sure how the copyright aspect was managed. Perhaps it would be safe to publish a short version rather than full paper.
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