A tool to strip ResearchGate modifications from a PDF file.
ResearchGate provides a useful repository for PDFs of research articles. However, articles uploaded to ResearchGate are subjected to some processing before being made available for download: a cover page is inserted with links to ResearchGate pages for the authors. This is easy to remove using a tool such as pdftk. More recently, a more pervasive modification has been applied: the text of the entire paper is processed, and any citation or reference is turned into a link to the corresponding ResearchGate page for the article (or, when ResearchGate doesn't have a page for the article, a link to ResearchGate's home page). For these links to work, the user must have a ResearchGate account and be logged in. They are distractingly marked with a thick blue underline, producing a particularly striking effect in the list of references. They supplant any original links to which the same text originally pointed (for example, a DOI link to a referenced article, or a link from citation to reference). The process also deactivates non-citation links within the article -- so, for instance, internal links to figures and URL links to websites stop working.
In short: ResearchGate damages PDFs uploaded to their website. This program attempts to undo some of the damage.
clean-rg-pdf removes the cover page, blue underlining, and ResearchGate links from a PDF processed by ResearchGate. Unfortunately it's difficult or impossible to fully undo the damage: links in the original PDF are probably gone for good. clean-rg-pdf should at least make the document look like the original, even if it doesn't work quite as well.
clean-rg-pdf.py <input-file> <output-file>
clean-rg-pdf is an extremely short Python script. The heavy lifting is done by Patrick Maupin's pdfrw library. clean-rg-pdf depends on some fairly specific internal formatting to find the underlinings, so will probably stop working if ResearchGate change their PDF munging system. It's only been tested with a small number of documents, so may even fail on some current PDFs.
clean-rg-pdf is Copyright 2016 Pontus Lurcock (pont at talvi dot net) and released under the MIT license:
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