Is Article One Partners a scam or not? See this for two conflicting opinions.
5 Answers
Not a scam. I've been researching for them for several years, and have been very pleased with the experience. You don't get paid for your time...it's more of a contest. You submit relevant research and the highest quality submissions win cash awards. There are numerous types of awards (and one category of guaranteed payments for invited "Experts").
Most of the time you don't win, but when you do, you can earn thousands of dollars.
Hope that helps.
David
In a strict sense no it is not; if you provide something really good i.e. something that knocks out a patent then you will get paid (in around 3 or 4 months) when you do a validity search.
But as with all things in life, there is a down side to it. Try to avoid state of the art searches as they are the easiest ones and usually a winner is awarded "instantly", if you are a "member". What I noticed is that even if you provide 3 really good references, AOP will not increase your submissions (or will increase it 2 days beore the search ends) and thus you will not have a chance to submit more, whilst "members" will have this option and win the prize. In this way the house always wins. Use these searches to increase your in scope submissions which has to be 10% or more in order to be eligible for the prize.
The validity searches are the most promising. As I said earlier, you have to find a really good reference in order to get the award which is not 4500 but 2000 USD while at the same time beating competition.
As always you never know what other people have submitted or how many submissions have been made; you are always in the dark.
Hope this helps to clarify free labour in the digital world...
Maybe, not a scam. But the award given may be unfair.
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It would help if you could provide us with some background. What (evidence-wise) makes you think it's not a scam? What makes you think the award is unfair? Dec 8, 2014 at 9:53
It is basically a scam. Lot of bait and switch tactics. The amount paid is rarely the amount listed for each study. There's no transparency. The rubric is not used consistently and is very subjective. Updates to studies will contradict previous "leads". Website is difficult to navigate and the content within the same webpage will contradict itself.
Basically they're crowd sourcing the work that their clients pay them to do. Definitely not worth the time.
It is 100 percent scam.
The submissions limit increase is only to collect more and more documents and to fool the researcher into thinking he is going to get some money. In the end after submitting 20-30 exact matching documents, he gets nothing and the one submitting one or two documents wins the money as if it is a lottery not patent research.
The same people are being awarded every time. Whatever combination you try and select important points in study they still give the money to them same people.
Submitting the same documents directly to the clients will get you more money as the clients are not getting the required documents from RWS - AOP connect.
They reject all important documents citing these reasons and say your money was given to someone else.
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"Highlights are critical to demonstrate how the response is related to the study research requirements. Unfortunately, your highlights are unacceptable and as a result the response is not eligible for reward.
The reason the highlights are designated as unacceptable is: the highlight does not map to the Research Requirement."
"Here’s another tip with regard to highlighting. Don’t ignore the highlight warnings – excessive highlighting will never win a reward. The purpose of highlighting is to direct the attention of our Study Management team to the most interesting part of the document. Make them want to “look more closely”. Burying the lead by highlighting an excessive amount of language only exhibits the lack of attention to the study requirements – it DOES NOT exhibit that substantive work has been performed. The rules of every study require accurate highlighting. Accordingly, should you submit the best reference but highlight the document unacceptably, we will award prize money you otherwise would have won to the second-best reference."