Academic social network accused of infringing copyright on a massive scale: “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 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…”