Open access policies
Social Sharing
- Emailing a link or PDF to colleagues.
- Posting a link or PDF on a personal website or institutional website.
- Archiving a version of the content in an institutional repository.
- Posting a link or PDF in a social sharing site such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, or SSRN.
Sharing is important. We support responsible sharing.
Content sharing is a natural and vital part of research. It helps to disseminate and raise awareness about new findings and to stimulate discussion and further progress.
Social sharing is the use of social sharing sites to share content widely: it makes sharing more efficient and effective. Social sharing sites can also help researchers to build their reputations and to connect with other researchers.
Social sharing is developing rapidly, with new and improved online services to enable content discovery and access. Researchers are sharing more and more, but content is not always shared in a responsible manner. We are positively engaged with social sharing and want to support it without undermining the publication of high quality books and journals upon which research and learning depends.
Frequently asked questions on content sharing
Responsible sharing means respecting publishers’ policies about which versions of content can be publicly posted online and when the content can be posted. Ultimately, it means sharing in a way that does not undermine the sustainability of the high quality publications on which research and learning depend.
Cambridge University Press offers three ways for you to share your work:
- You can post a link to the final published version of your work.
- Our Green Open Access policies allow you to post a version of your work in institutional repositories and other sites. Please see our full policies for journals, books and Elements. We don't normally allow final version PDFs of journal articles to be posted online or shared, and we encourage you to link to your work on Cambridge Core, which will allow us to track usage and provide you with more information about the impact of your work.
- Use Cambridge Core Share , which allows you to create a link to a free-to-read version of your final published journal article.
An important aspect of publishing is that we must demonstrate usage of our products to our customers. For example, we provide detailed usage reports to librarians to help them determine the value that our products have for them. Authors can also use usage metrics to demonstrate the impact of their work in a variety of ways. We can only track usage on our site, however, so usage of our content on other sites won’t be represented.
Social sharing can damage journals and books if large volumes of content, especially the final published Versions of Record, are freely available on sharing sites. This can lead to lower usage of content on our site and reduced demand from faculty, leading to cancelled subscriptions and lower sales. This in turn puts the continued viability of our books and journals at risk.
There will not be a single solution for sharing and we need to experiment in a variety of ways. We are currently focussed on:
- Cambridge Core Share , which allows authors and subscribers to easily share free-to-read final versions of journal articles in a responsible manner.
- Encouraging discussion and debate about how sharing can benefit researchers and the wider community, and how sharing can be compatible with the continued publication of high quality books and journals.
- Collaborating with ResearchGate to continue supporting responsible content sharing which protects the rights of the authors and publishers.
We endorse the following two cross-industry initiatives:
How Can I Share It?
www.howcanishareit.com
A website to raise awareness about sharing and to help authors locate information about what they can share.
STM Association's Voluntary Principles on Article Sharing
www.stm-assoc.org/stm-consultations/scn-consultation-2015/
A document to help guide ongoing conversations and the development of new services that encourage and enable responsible social sharing.
We have entered an agreement with ResearchGate to provide more guidance for users of ResearchGate about how to post within the limits of copyright law. For more information please read our press release and our FAQs.
Cambridge University Press and ResearchGate FAQs
The last few years have seen academic publishers engaging with scholarly collaboration networks in various ways, trying to balance their popularity with authors and researchers against concerns over large-scale copyright infringement. Cambridge University Press, recently signed an agreement with ResearchGate to foster responsible sharing - see our joint statement here. These FAQs work to explain the approach that we have taken.
ResearchGate is a scholarly collaboration site where researchers can share and discuss their work, follow research topics, and pose and answer questions. ResearchGate was founded in 2008 by the physicians Dr. Ijad Madisch and Dr. Sören Hofmayer, along with computer specialist Horst Fickenscher. They have completed four rounds of financing from Benchmark, Founders Fund, Bill Gates, Tenaya Capital, Wellcome Trust, Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, and Four Rivers Group.
We support collaboration between researchers, including the sharing of articles. It is of course vital that any sharing is done responsibly and in accordance with our Green OA and sharing policies – without this, the viability of many of our journals could be at risk.
Many of the articles in ResearchGate have been posted in breach of publishers’ policies or authors’ agreements with their publishers. Most authors don’t realise that they should not post articles in this way: their goal is to disseminate their work and collaborate with other scholars. However, given the size of ResearchGate, this has the potential to undermine our subscription business and the sustainability of our society partners. 15 million researchers have made more than 215 million connections on the network. The Coalition for Responsible Sharing estimates that there are approximately 4 million infringing articles on the site, as of April 2018. We therefore want to work with ResearchGate to minimise the inappropriate posting of content and to provide authors with easy access to information about what they can legitimately post.
This agreement forms just one part of the Press’s approach, alongside the launch of Cambridge Core Share, a tool that enables authors and readers to easily generate a link to an online, read-only journal article, and our Green Open Access policies. See our social sharing page for more information about responsible sharing.
This agreement provides both more visibility for publishers into the content posted to ResearchGate and more guidance for users of ResearchGate about how to post within the limits of our policies and copyright law. CUP will be able to crawl the ResearchGate site to locate infringing content and will pass instructions on to ResearchGate, ultimately directing authors to a page on our own site with CUP-specific information. The intention is that a combination of monitoring infringing content and working with authors will help foster a culture of responsible sharing.
We want to support open research and collaboration; we therefore prefer to work with rather than against organisations like ResearchGate that provide resources for open research and legitimate sharing. Scholarly collaboration networks also help make content more discoverable and can help with the dissemination of content.
There are a number of ways in which you can share your work responsibly:
- You can post a link to the final published version of your work.
- Our Green Open Access policies allow you to post a version of your work in institutional repositories and other sites. Please see our full policies for journals, books and Elements. We don't normally allow final version PDFs of journal articles to be posted online or shared, and we encourage you to link to your work on Cambridge Core, which will allow us to track usage and provide you with more information about the impact of your work.
- Use Cambridge Core Share, which allows you to create a link to a free-to-read version of your final published journal article. This tool is free to use for our authors and subscribers.
Yes, Open Access content published under the appropriate CC-BY licences (or related) can be posted. As ResearchGate is a commercial organization, those articles published under a non-commercial license (typically CC-BY-ND or CC-BY-NC-ND) would not fall into this category however.
We actively encourage every journal to participate, please contact your CUP editor to initiate the process.
This agreement forms just one part of the Press’s approach, alongside the launch of Cambridge Core Share, a tool that enables authors and readers to easily generate a link to an online, read-only journal article, and our Green Open Access policies.
The year-long term gives us a chance to learn from the data and to revisit the agreement. The agreement may then be extended or re-negotiated.