13 OCTOBER 2017 • VOL 358 ISSUE 6360 161 SCIENCE
sciencemag.org
Almost all of the roughly 150 clouds
mapped so far turned out to be just a few
thousand light-years away, tracing out arms
on this side of the galactic center. So it was
a shock when the team found a beacon
66,000 light-years away—on the opposite
side of the galaxy, farther from its center
than the sun is. “It was kind of funny, this
discovery,” Sanna says.
The cloud’s position, cross-referenced
with its motion, indicates that it belongs to
the outer reaches of the Scutum-Centaurus
arm, which sprouts on this side of the galaxy and wraps around to the far side. Meanwhile, the closer beacons mapped earlier
support an emerging consensus that, in addition to Scutum-Centaurus, the galaxy has
three other arms, which Reid’s team calls
Sagittarius, Perseus, and Outer. The sun belongs to the small Local spur, sandwiched
between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms.
Other teams are joining the mapping effort. A Japanese group is relying on the same
basic strategy as BeSSeL, and a Brazilian
group is using archival satellite data to map
clusters of newborn stars glowing in infrared light, which also passes through dust.
For their part, the BeSSeL team starting next
year plans to use an Australian radio array to
see parts of the Milky Way visible only in the
Southern Hemisphere.
One new competitor looms over the entire field. In April 2018, the European Space
Agency’s Gaia probe will release 3D coordinates for more than 1 billion Milky Way
objects, most of them stars, which should
show the spiral arms, especially the nearby
ones, in unprecedented detail (Science,
13 December 2013, p. 1305). “A lot of this
work is being done by people racing to get
their results out before the Gaia results
come out,” says astronomer Gerry Gilmore
of the University of Cambridge in the United
Kingdom, who leads the U.K. Gaia team.
Gaia won’t unveil all of the Milky Way,
though. “They often forget that they can’t
see through dust,” Reid says. Gaia works
in optical wavelengths, which cannot penetrate the haze of the galactic center to
reach the obscure regions that BeSSeL is
now probing.
A good map of the Milky Way would
aid other astrophysical quests. For example, knowing the true location of a particular binary pulsar—a pair of spinning
neutron stars—would improve a Nobel Prize–
winning test of Albert Einstein’s theory of
general relativity that relied on the pulsar
signals. But Reid has a simpler goal. “My
primary motivation is just to see what the
Milky Way looks like,” he says. “It just seems
like such a cool thing to do.” j
Joshua Sokol is a journalist in Boston.
Publishers take academic
networking site to court
Plaintiffs accuse site of massive copyright violation
SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING
Scholarly publishing giants Elsevier and the American Chemical Society (ACS) last week filed a lawsuit in Germany against ResearchGate, a popular academic networking site, alleging copyright infringement on
a massive scale. The move comes after a
larger group of publishers became dissatisfied with ResearchGate’s response to a request to alter its article-sharing practices.
ResearchGate, a for-profit firm in Berlin
that was founded in 2008, is one of the largest social networking sites
for academics. It claims more
than 13 million users, who
can use their personal pages
to upload and share a range
of material, including published papers. The firm has
raised more than $87 million
from the Wellcome Trust
charity in London, Goldman
Sachs, and Bill Gates.
In recent years, journal
publishers have become increasingly concerned about
the millions of copyrighted
papers—usually accessible only behind subscription paywalls—that are being shared
by ResearchGate users. On 15 September,
the International Association of Scientific,
Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM)
wrote to ResearchGate on behalf of more
than 140 publishers, expressing concerns
about its article-sharing practices. Specifically, the organization proposed that
ResearchGate implement a “seamless and
easy” automated system that would help
the site’s users determine whether an article
could be legally shared publicly or privately.
The association asked for a response by
22 September. (AAAS, which publishes
Science, is a member of the association.)
Last week, a group of five publishers—
ACS, Elsevier, Brill, Wiley, and Wolters
Kluwer—announced that ResearchGate had
rejected the association’s proposal. Instead,
the group, which calls itself the Coalition for
Responsible Sharing, said that ResearchGate
suggested publishers should send the company formal “takedown notices” asking it to
remove content that breaches copyright.
The five publishers will be sending take-
down notices, according to the group. But
the coalition also alleges that ResearchGate
is illicitly making as many as 7 million copy-
righted articles freely available and that the
company’s “business model depends on the
distribution of these in-copyright articles to
generate traffic to its site.” The coalition says
that sending millions of takedown notices
“is not a viable long-term solution, given the
current and future scale of infringement.”
As a result, two coalition members—ACS
and Elsevier—have opted to go to court. The
lawsuit, filed in a German regional court,
asks for “clarity and judge-
ment” on the legality of
posting such content, says
ACS’s James Milne, spokes-
person for the Coalition for
Responsible Sharing. “The
underlying behavioral issue
of ResearchGate is that it
scrapes copyrighted material
off the web, invites research-
ers to upload it to their
portfolio, and modifies ar-
ticles,” he says. (On 10 Octo-
ber, the coalition noted that
ResearchGate had “removed
from public view a significant number of
copyrighted articles” but that “not all viola-
tions have been addressed.”)
Jon Tennant, communications director of
professional research network ScienceOpen
(also an STM member) in Berlin, believes
ResearchGate will lose the court battle. “The
consequences of this could be variable, from
losing some of its data corpus—the infringing
articles—to being asked to pay for damages,”
he says. Guido Westkamp, an intellectual
property professor at Queen Mary University
of London, notes that the decision’s effect
“would usually be limited to Germany and
would not [be] enforceable in the U.S.”
A ResearchGate spokesperson declined
to comment but pointed to a statement the
firm jointly released with Springer Nature,
an STM member, on 9 October. It says both
companies are “cautiously optimistic” that
a solution can be found and “invite other
publishers and societies to join the talks.” j
Dalmeet Singh Chawla is a science journal-
ist in London.
By Dalmeet Singh Chawla
ResearchGate’s
“business model
depends on the
distribution of
these in-copyright
articles … ”
Coalition for
Responsible Sharing
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