Leading publishers are stepping up their fight against ResearchGate by ordering the academic social network to take down papers that they say infringe copyright.

The move could see millions of articles removed from the site, as the publishers say up to 40 per cent of papers on ResearchGate are copyrighted.

James Milne, a spokesman for the group of five academic publishers, which includes Elsevier, Wiley and Brill, said that the first batch of take-down notices would be sent “imminently”.

“We’re not doing this in any way against the researchers, we’re doing this against ResearchGate,” he told Times Higher Education. ​The site was “clearly hosting and happily uploading material that they know they don’t have the licence or copyrights” to, and was “refusing to work with us to solve that problem”, he added.

According to a survey of academics released last year, Berlin-based ResearchGate is by some way the world’s biggest academic social network, used by about 60 per cent of academics, particularly in the physical and life sciences, and has raised nearly $90 million (£68 million) in funding from investors, according to the website Crunchbase.

Publishers are seeing “anecdotal” evidence that the availability of papers on the site is eating into their revenues, said Dr Milne. “We have heard during the subscriptions renewal process that librarians are occasionally referencing ResearchGate as an alternative to resubscribing to journals,” he said.

He attacked ResearchGate as being “backed by hundreds of millions of dollars [from venture capitalists,] who are seeking to make a profit from what [ResearchGate] do, which is upload copyright infringed material”.

“They put nothing back into the process for generating and validating and curating all that material,” he said.

The publisher Elsevier drew a backlash from many academics in 2013 when it told users of Academia.edu, a rival to ResearchGate, to take down papers to which it had rights. Dr Milne stressed that this time, the publishers would not directly send take-down notices to academics. “We will work with ResearchGate on this, not researchers,” he said, although the organisation would be communicating “en masse” with academics about how they can share their work properly.

But for the publishers, sending out mass take-down notices is not a permanent solution. “That in itself doesn’t solve the problem, because every day ResearchGate is uploading more and more material,” said Dr Milne, trapping publishers in a “perpetual loop” of having to identify infringing papers. He argued that this would be confusing for researchers, as “one day there’s content, and the next day there isn’t”, he said.

Elsevier and the American Chemical Society are therefore also taking ResearchGate to court where they hope to obtain a ruling that would stop ResearchGate “scraping content off the web, uploading it...and asking researchers to claim it” so that infringing material “is not in the public domain”, he explained. The court claim would be lodged in Europe, he said.

A ResearchGate spokeswoman declined to comment. The company’s founder and chief executive, Ijad Madisch, has previously said that he “wouldn’t mind” if copyrighted material was removed from the site, as researchers could continue to share papers privately.

david.matthews@timeshighereducation.com