ResearchGate providing free access to journals.

This is a pretty awesome loophole potentially allowing free access to journals people would not normally have available.

ResearchGATE launches SelfArchiving
Repository
Scientific Online Network ResearchGATE blazes a new route into the world of Open
Access
Boston, September 15th 2009. The last few weeks have been big here at ResearchGATE
(www.researchgate.net), the world's largest online scientific platform. We have only been online
since May last year, but already have 140,000 members. Recently, we introduced our
international Job Board for Science and Higher Education. But today is set to be even bigger, as
we are launching our SelfArchiving
Repository. This will make full‐text articles available to the
public, for free – the first application of its kind worldwide!
Currently, there is no way for researchers to access millions of publications in their full version
online. ResearchGATE is now changing this by enabling users to upload their published research
directly to their profile pages (a system called the “green route” to Open Access). Our
publication index, containing metadata for 35 million publications, will be automatically
matched with the SHERPA RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) data set of journal and
publisher’s selfarchiving
agreements. As a result, authors will know which versions of their
articles they can legally upload. Since nine out of ten journals allow selfarchiving,
this project
could give thousands of researchers immediate access to articles that are not yet freely available.
Our SelfArchiving
Repository does not infringe on copyrights because each profile page within
ResearchGATE is legally considered the personal website of the user (and the majority of journal
publishers allow articles to be openly accessible on personal homepages). Therefore, each user
can upload his or her published articles in compliance with selfarchiving
regulations . Our
publication index makes every publication identifiable and is searchable. Since each profile is
networked to the larger platform, the uploaded resources will form an enormous pool of
research for our members. Of course, it’s free of charge, like the all the other resources at
ResearchGATE.
To learn more about ResearchGATE and its many features, visit www.researchgate.net and sign
up for a free profile. Also, feel free to contact our team at press@researchgate.net.
To learn more about SelfArchiving,
visit www.self‐archiving.me