Strikes Policy

We want to make sure that ResearchGate stays a place for research-focused sharing of content and constructive exchange and discussion. Everyone on ResearchGate should feel free to express their professional opinion while remaining respectful and tolerant of others. 

Because of this, we’ve set up some basic rules outlining appropriate conduct on ResearchGate. You can read these rules in our Community Guidelines and Terms of Service. Under this Strikes Policy, a violation of these rules can result in a strike against you. Repeat or severe violations may result in your access to your account being permanently disabled.

If we find that your content or conduct violates our Community Guidelines, Terms of Service, or the law, we may take action on your content or account. This action may mean that we:

• Disable public access to, remove, delete, block, modify, demote, or reformat your content. 
• Send you a warning or issue a strike against your account. 
• Permanently disable your access to your account.

In determining what action to take, we take into account: 

• The gravity of the violation. This includes things like:
  
  - The nature of the content and any wider context  
  - How bad the content or conduct is. Is it more of an annoyance to others (e.g. spam), or does it violate the law?
  - The potential consequences of the violation, such as potential harm to others 

• The rights and legitimate interests of all parties involved, including the rights to freedom of expression and information, respect for private life, and protection of personal data
• Your intent, where it can be reasonably identified
• Previous violations. This includes whether you have had content removed or received a strike in the past. 

Generally, your access to your account will be disabled after you receive between two and four strikes. In some cases (e.g., if you threaten or pose a risk to others), a violation may be severe enough that we’ll disable access to your account after the first strike. 

We want to make sure that ResearchGate stays professional, collaborative, and respectful, and provides a space for every researcher in the community to be empowered to do their best work. Because of this, strikes do not expire.

In line with our Intellectual Property Policy and applicable law, our Strikes Policy provides for the termination of accounts that engage in repeat copyright infringement. In copyright cases, we usually operate a four-strike policy. This means: 

• Each time a compliant copyright complaint is lodged against your content, a strike is applied against you. Depending on the copyright owner’s request, we might remove the content, or disable public access to it and change its visibility to private. If we change the visibility to private, a private copy of the content will still be available for you and your co-authors to access.
• On the third strike, in addition to removing or disabling public access to the content, we typically disable public access to all of your other publicly available full-texts of articles and conference papers and change their visibility to private. We do this to give you a chance to review your content and consider your rights before publicly sharing more content. Because we give you this opportunity, we think it’s fair that copyright strikes don’t expire.
• On the fourth strike, your access to your account may be disabled. 

In some cases (for example, if we have an agreement with the publisher), a copyright complaint won’t result in a strike being added to your account. A strike also won’t be counted if a copyright complaint is retracted by the copyright owner. When we notify you about a copyright complaint against your content we’ll let you know if a strike has been counted.

If we take action on your content or account, we’ll inform you what action was taken and why. As part of this notice, we’ll let you know if a strike has been counted. 

Please note: We may not notify you of action taken on your content or account in cases where we are prohibited from doing so for legal reasons, or if it would be unreasonable given the interests of the parties.