ResearchGate and Royal Society of Chemistry announce partnership

ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and the Royal Society of Chemistry, a learned society founded 180 years ago – and whose mission includes providing opportunities and tools for the chemical science community to network, create and exchange knowledge, adapt and thrive – have today announced a partnership that will see all journals from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s open access portfolio benefit from an enhanced presence on ResearchGate through its new Journal Home offering.

As part of the Journal Home offering, all version-of-record content from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s eight newly launched open access journals will be syndicated directly to ResearchGate, dedicated journal profiles will be created and made accessible on the network, and each journal will be prominently represented on all of its associated article pages on ResearchGate. This enhanced presence will help to grow the readership of these journals – as measured via COUNTER-compliant reporting – as well as increase journal visibility and engagement among the highly relevant researcher audience that is active on ResearchGate.

Last year, the Royal Society of Chemistry announced its intention to transition to a wholly open access publisher within the next five years, and, given researchers specializing in chemistry represent one of the largest audiences on ResearchGate, both parties see a clear opportunity to accelerate growth in readership and submissions for the new open access journals included in the partnership.

Authors of the articles included in the partnership will see their content automatically added to their publication pages on ResearchGate, giving them access to statistics showing the impact of their work, and enabling them to connect with their readers. Additionally, researchers will be able to more easily learn about potential publishing opportunities across the Royal Society of Chemistry’s growing portfolio.

“We’re excited to be able to connect the 1.5 million chemists on ResearchGate with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s newly launched open access journals, and we look forward to helping to accelerate growth in readership and submissions for these exciting new publishing venues,” said Sören Hofmayer, Chief Strategy Officer at ResearchGate.

Sara Bosshart, Head of Open Access at the Royal Society of Chemistry, said: “One of the key goals in our transition to 100% OA is to ensure maximum access to our content – that everyone, everywhere has the same ability to read all of the key research we publish.

“We know that ResearchGate is one of the most used platforms within academia and so we hope that by making the OA content in our new OA journals available directly on ResearchGate that this will facilitate ease of access to this content across the globe.

“We look forward to seeing the usage data from ResearchGate and anticipate that we will reach a broader network of researchers – not only chemists – through this partnership.”