Having been informed by this research portal that my research proposal, related to a question of ethics and epistemology, will be deleted at the end of March, I would like to know what the research community thinks of this style of initiative. Thank you in advance for your answers and your hypotheses.
I have ongoing research as well. I am sure most of us do, and I think this is a terrible idea to delete the projects. Some of us like to see what others are working on and even collaborate on the projects. If this feature is removed, we can now only see completed works.
The message I got is following :
We're retiring Projects on March 31, 2023
After much consideration, we've decided to discontinue Projects. You can no longer create new projects, and we’ll remove all current projects at the end of March.
Read our blog to find out what this means for you and what we’re working on next.
Who is "we" ? Who is working on what ? Is this research portal intended to guide our own research ?
I very regret about the decision to retire projects in RG. This was a good possibility to order publications by subjects, to inform the community about the progress of own long-term projects, and to get informed about the progress of projects of other researchers. - You may try to contact RG's support team at https://www.researchgate.net/contact. If many users complain, perhaps the decision will be revised. I have sent my opinion to them.
Thanks a lot, Wolfgang. If you could share this question with your contacts, it would be useful.
Dear Louise Lambrichs , your question is absolutely relevant, and my answer is that many of us are negatively affected by the termination of projects. It was an excellent tool for cooperation and a good way to show the results of even quite extensive cooperation to interested parties. That is now over.
The published explanation hardly explains anything. But we are "just" users.
I received the following reply from a member of the ResearchGate Community Support concerning my expression of regrets about the retirement of projects: "While we understand your feelings regarding this decision, we are aiming to provide a better experience for researchers like yourself to showcase your work and stay up to date. To that end, we plan to release multiple features this year to make it easier to share updates, discover new research, and engage with topics. We hope you will join us as we continue to make ResearchGate a more useful tool for all researchers."
Hello Dr Louise Lambrichs
I can see it negatively impacts your work - especially you are only just starting on some aspects. I honestly wonder what is in mind at RG, as mentioned to the enquiry by Dr Wolfgang R. Dick . I wonder what they mean by features to "make it easier to share updates, discover new research, and engage with topics".
Here is a related discussion with several replies: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Were_retiring_Projects_on_March_31_2023/1. Generally, it seems that many users are worried by the planned retirement of projects. During the last two weeks, a lot of questions about this were asked - see my replies to many of these at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wolfgang-Dick-3/answers.
It's a shame that there isn't any way that ResearchGate can't have any way in which members can vote or at least give an opinion about changes that affect so many of us.
I think that, just in case the discontinuation of projects indeed goes though, one should back up one's projects to the maximum possible extent, both requesting project backup files from RG as outlined at
https://explore.researchgate.net/display/support/Projects
and perhaps also consider backing up the project web page using a web archiver like e.g. https://archive.ph or https://web.archive.org, so that there is a publicly shareable link to the archived copy of the project log; see also the related question
https://www.researchgate.net/post/The_end_of_Researchgate_projects_what_to_do
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