We are currently running a Diamond Open Access journal using Open Journal Systems (OJS) as our primary publishing platform. While OJS is exceptional for managing the editorial workflow and basic indexing, we are currently evaluating ways to increase our journal’s discoverability and readership.
One option we are considering is leveraging ResearchGate (either by encouraging authors to upload their papers or exploring official publisher syndication integrations). However, since we already offer 100% free, immediate access directly on our OJS website, we are weighing the pros and cons.
I would love to hear from other editors or publishers in the Diamond OA ecosystem:
1. Does your Diamond OA journal actively push content to ResearchGate? If so, have you noticed a significant impact on your article metrics, citations, or author satisfaction?
2. How do you handle the workflow? Do you rely on automated metadata/VoR (Version of Record) exports, or do authors manually link the papers to their profiles?
3. Are there any risks? Does duplicating content on a commercial platform like ResearchGate conflict with any institutional or long-term Diamond OA sustainability principles?
4. How much does this kind of hosting cost?
Looking forward to your insights and best practices!
1- with the annual subscripton the titles are automatically updated by ReseearchGate using Crossref registration. I did not really noticed a significant impact up to now on metrics, citations andI do not know for authors satisfaction.
2- I rely on metadata exports
3- I do not think there is risk of duplicating content as the titles are the original ones with exact reference. The full text is not uploaded automatically, it is the choice of the editor to add it or not for each article. Personnaly i upload all.
4- without subscription it is free, but only authors can upload their articles,whereas, with subscription, titlle are automatically uploaded with metadata for all author even if they are not registered in ResearcyGate. The official cost for subscription then was 1500€ last year but I had the benefit of a 50% discount as being amond the first subscribers. The problem for a medical journal is that you are hardly cited as long as you are not indexed in PubMed, that’s the problem.
My personal opinion is that ResearhGate is overrated as regards dissemination - even for individual researchers, let alone journals. Journals can achieve good visibility by leveraging open metadata, optimizing their publishing platforms for harvesting and registering their metadata exchange endpoints with relevant aggregators. Here are a couple of slides that I often use in presentations to illustrate this point: dissemination-paths.pptx - Google Slides
Also, from the perspective of journal development, ensuring that articles are available in structured, machine-readable full-text formats (e.g. JATS XML) has greater benefits than investing effort in dissemination through ResearchGate. This is especially important for medical journals, where XML is a prerequisite for inclusion in PubMed.
Thank you for raising these important questions. I would personally have some reservations about making ResearchGate part of a Diamond Open Access journal’s institutional dissemination strategy.
My caution is based partly on the evidence concerning the platform’s metrics and lack of transparency. In Metrics fraud on ResearchGate, Savina Kirilova and Fred Zoepfl document artificially inflated reads, meaningless comments, fake recommendations, and coordinated behavior intended to manipulate ResearchGate metrics. Their findings raise serious questions about the validity of these indicators as measures of scientific reputation:
Earlier, Peter Kraker, Katy Jordan, and Elisabeth Lex described the RG Score as opaque, irreproducible, and methodologically problematic. Their analysis showed that it operated as a black-box metric and incorporated journal-level indicators into the assessment of individual researchers:
More generally, the scientometric literature on ResearchGate contains a substantial number of studies questioning the validity, transparency, and susceptibility to manipulation of some of its indicators. This does not mean that the platform has no value: it may certainly provide additional visibility and networking opportunities. However, I would be hesitant to make it a central dissemination strategy for a Diamond OA journal.
From my perspective, Diamond Open Access is not only about removing price barriers. It is also about strengthening the scholarly commons through open and community-governed infrastructures. I would therefore prioritize interoperable and non-proprietary services—such as repositories, institutional archives, DOAJ, Crossref, OpenAlex, OpenAIRE, institutional CRIS systems, and rich metadata exposure through OAI-PMH—before investing in integration with a commercial platform whose governance, algorithms, and long-term business model remain outside the scholarly community’s control.
Of course, authors should be free to share their work on ResearchGate whenever their publishing agreements allow it, and I would not discourage them from doing so. But, at the journal level, I would prefer to invest limited resources in strengthening open infrastructures rather than increasing dependence on a commercial ecosystem.
Just my two cents. I would also be very interested to know whether anyone has robust evidence that publisher-level integration with ResearchGate produces sustained improvements in readership or citations beyond what can already be achieved through good indexing, persistent identifiers, open metadata, and repository-based dissemination.