I believe that a lot of researchers share information on their projects (used RG data). It has been cool for those of us who have used it and enjoy it. However, there is an update that it will be discontinued in RG from 31st march, 2023. So my question hereon is based on the usefulness. Is projects tap on ResearchGate (RG) important to you?
In a recent RG blog posted online at https://www.researchgate.net/researchgate-updates/retiring-projects, they posted that "the goal is to create a better science by empowering researchers to do their best work. That's why it’s important that every feature we build and maintain can enable researchers to be more effective in their jobs. By discontinuing Projects, we’ll be able to create better features that can help our members more.
This news may be disappointing to some, especially for those who put lots of time and energy into sharing project updates about their work. We talked with researchers who used Projects a lot to find out how we could support them. We learned they’d like to keep all their project updates for later, so we built a tool that lets collaborators request a copy of their projects and sends them a link to download their data."
They stated that it did not work as intended, so they wish to make RG better, hopefully with another tap or product in future. They added that "Projects were originally designed to help researchers share their work, especially their early stage research, and collaborate with their colleagues. For some, however, it can be difficult to share early work publicly, and researchers are generally not encouraged to within the current scientific landscape.
Additionally, the project update feature is limited and doesn’t serve the needs of many researchers. As a result, most projects don't have a lot of updates, which makes them less useful than we'd hoped — both for the project's collaborators and for people who want to find out about new research in their field. Although Projects did not work as we intended, we did see a clear interest from researchers in highlighting their recent research and sharing updates with relevant researchers." What are your thoughts? Once again I ask, is projects tap on ResearchGate important to you?
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.
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."
I understood that projects are important for senior PIs. I my case I am mainly reporting my publications for a single project, so I guess it will not make a big difference if they disable this feature. Maybe if I become like you (i.e., an importnat PI), I then regret losing the chance of oganizing my publications in projects.
Thank you, it shows that RG plan to develop another tab that could be used to engage more on research projects and research works in future releases. It might be under testing or a beta stage at the moment. Hopeful that it would be more engaging though
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