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The Royal Society is one of the world’s most prestigious scientific societies and is the oldest scientific society in continuous existence. It has played a part in some of the most fundamental, significant, and life-changing discoveries in scientific history and continues to publish high impact research from across the sciences in its ten journals.
The Society is continually looking for innovative ways to connect with the research community to ensure that it is delivering on its mission to promote excellence in science, support international collaboration, and to demonstrate the importance of science to all. The Royal Society is particularly committed to increasing the participation of and diversity in Early Career Researchers (ECRs).
It was with a focus on innovation, diversity, and open access (OA) that the Royal Society first discovered the highly engaged community of researchers on ResearchGate.
“I read about the kind of coverage that ResearchGate has, including with Early Career Researchers, which is a particular audience that we were really trying to connect with,” said Graham Anderson, Head of Publishing Operations at the Royal Society. “We want to make sure that Early Career Researchers know about our APC-free Transformative Agreements that they have available to them.”
Scholarly social networks - like ResearchGate - have grown into an important route for researchers to discover scholarly content. Researchers want frictionless access to content – whether OA or paywalled – and to know that the content can be trusted.
Reaching ECRs had been a challenge for the Royal Society. As a national academy, it has an extensive network of established researchers and access to the network of young scientists it supports, but this is a limited subset of talented, largely British based researchers. The Royal Society needed more innovative ways to cut through the noise and reach ECRs globally.
“Researchers are getting very similar messages from various publishers trying to get their attention,” explained Anderson.
Learning about ResearchGate's successful collaborations with other publishers, the Royal Society saw an opportunity to leverage the power of ResearchGate’s network.
The Royal Society initiated a trial phase with ResearchGate’s Journal Home offering, during which all content from their two OA journals was made available on ResearchGate along with a newly activated journal profile and an enhanced presentation of the journals across relevant touchpoints on the platform.
“We hoped we would be able to see additional usage and downloads from ResearchGate compared to what we would get from our own journals platform,” said Anderson.
The Royal Society also wanted to test the potential for ResearchGate to generate higher awareness through more prominent journal branding. More than 5,000 version-of-record OA articles from the journals Open Biology and Royal Society Open Science were made available on ResearchGate. Additionally, both journals received enhanced branding on the platform, increasing the visibility of the journals with a clear presentation of the journal on all associated article pages, as well as a dedicated journal profile for Royal Society Open Science.
The pilot quickly delivered positive results, with a 64% increase in the usage of the syndicated content on the ResearchGate platform, as measured via COUNTER-compliant reporting over the first six months of the pilot.
“There were high numbers of usage and downloads from ResearchGate in a short space of time,” explained Anderson. “The numbers that we could see hadn't affected our regular usage from our platform.”
Importantly, more than 70% of the interactions with the Royal Society’s Journal Home sites were from the ECR target audience they had hoped to reach. Nearly 30% of interactions came from PhD Students and 40% were postdocs. The Society also benefited from wider reach to more experienced researchers on ResearchGate, with nearly 30% of interactions coming from professors and senior researchers.
Since the pilot began for the two open access titles, the Royal Society has seen additional usage of over 265k investigations, and over 65k requests.
“We wanted to see an overall increase in usage and data, which we did, and it indicated that we were reaching more or different people,” explained Anderson.
Encouraged by the pilot’s success, after six months the Royal Society decided to expand the relationship with ResearchGate to include all ten of their journals, including subscription journals this time.
“If we'd seen that sort of level of uptake in two journals, that's definitely going to help with the other journals as well,” explained Anderson.
The subscription content used ResearchGate’s entitlement system to ensure only subscribing researchers would be able to access the content. Since ResearchGate used both IP address and profile institution data to check entitlement, this enabled off-campus access to the content additionally boosting usage.
“One concern that we had would be that it would just open the floodgates for everyone to be able to look at everything. But we were reassured that ResearchGate would look at the entitlement for the researchers and university,” explained Anderson. “I found it reassuring that there is that extra level of security or integrity around the entitled data, and then once that has been shared, you know that's now live and working well.”
As of June 2023, all ResearchGate members have on-platform access to the OA articles from all ten Royal Society journals, and ResearchGate members subscribing to the journals have on-platform access to all backlist and frontlist content, encompassing more than 100,000 articles. The Royal Society continues to observe higher incremental usage (measured with COUNTER usage reporting), without any indication that this is cannibalising usage from the journals on their own platform.
The Royal Society are currently working on integrating the data from ResearchGate into their platform data to evaluate usage at a more granular level. They also hope to include this COUNTER usage data in their institutional reports in future, providing added value to their subscribing customers.
Aside from reach alone, the Royal Society benefits from the enhanced visibility to their journals provided by the Journal Home partnership.
“Being a partner publisher and having the platform as an always-on marketing channel as well has really helped, because the branding for the Royal Society is front and centre,” adds Anderson. “Often a researcher knows the journal name but they don't always put that with the publisher. I think linking the journal name to the publisher is generally helpful and will inevitably have an effect of reminding people that the journal is from the Royal Society.”
Overall, access to its portfolio of journals on ResearchGate has enabled the Royal Society to increase its visibility with a highly engaged researcher audience, and support their commitment to diversity, reaching a broader pool of early career researchers and geographies. The Royal Society will be continuing to evaluate its partnership, working closely with ResearchGate’s team to ensure they continue to get the most out of the agreement.
“I would say throughout all of this, ResearchGate has been very collaborative on everything,” adds Anderson. “They're a very innovative group of people to work with.”
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