When I realized that my (beloved, at the time) #ResearchGate decided to associate with the publisher #MDPI (known for shady practices, neglecting the peer-review process, used to be on Beall's list of predatory publishers, etc.), I created a little document to demand that they stop the partnership.
They totally did not care, but my little "cover page" has been the most read document from Neuroscience and from my institution in the past few weeks and it got recommended 780 times, I don't think I'll ever beat that with a real paper! 😂
It also started an interesting discussion, although I'm still not sure what the arguments in favour of MDPI are except 'other publishers are bad tooooo'. 🤔
If you're curious, it's here until I close my account, i.e. tomorrow, on the last day of 2023!!
Two persons at my usual lunch place were discussing #ResearchGate. It took considerable strength to stop myself from interrupting "Hey, I'm a librarian, I can answer all your questions on the subject!".
So #ResearchGate just made an agreement with... the predatory publisher #MDPI
I know not everyone liked it but I was actually finding ResearchGate quite useful. Now this is completely trashing the little reputation they had left in the toilet. MDPI might have a few good journals but it is overall famously known for its predatory practices like not listening to the reviewers and not having enough time for proper review between submission and publication.
This is a really disappointing move from ResearchGate that's really not in their interest. I guess they got a big check for it? Makes you wonder what other unscientific content are they getting paid to promote.
I'm going to write to them (e.g. press@researchgate.net) to ask that they cut all ties with MDPI and any other predatory publishers. I hope that many users will complain too. If it has no effect, I'll just have to close my account and never go there again...
"MDPI’s commitment to delivering a high-quality service for our authors" :rofl:
I guess you could say that not having proper peer-review is a service to the authors in a way?? 🤔
@elduvelle Has anyone received any kind of reply from #researchgate, or indeed any statement at all from them? I got no response, so am moving to delete my account asap #mdpi
@nadege I sent them an online request about this, but the form doesn’t seem to work so well. Anyone knows of a better way to contact #ResearchGate to ask for revoking this shady “partnership”?
Maybe it's time websites like #ResearchGate enable us to add other contacts to our profiles? The "Twitter" option doesn't even allow for other URLs (e.g., to a #Mastodon profile).
With all the problems over on the #birdsite, which is now not even accessible without an account, this seems like a strange limitation to me. Please change!
As I scroll through my #ResearchGate feed, here's a bunch of recent (March->May 2023), not-to-be-missed papers and preprints in the #Hippocampus / #Navigation field:
I have a two publications to my name, mostly for being attached to the group that actually wrote and edited the papers. (I did write software based on some of the ideas in the paper, but they weren't originally my ideas.)
OK. Whatever. What I'm curious about is, I'm on #ResearchGate and, lately, I get pretty regular notifications of new #citations on one of these papers, about once a month. It's a total of 80 since September 2018. Is this typical?
It's not a bad paper: I think it's actually quite good. Still, it's not "groundbreaking"? It's about an approach to #SystemsBiology where we use computer simulation that integrates multiple models to validate our overall understanding of an organism. Is that what folks are into these days?
Anyway, I just want a hint, because I'm not likely to actually read all these papers that cite us, if this is, like, paper mill output or are other folks legitimately taking on the ideas and building on them.