Looking into Pandora's Box: The Content of Sci-Hub and its Usage

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras

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Academic Publishing and Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Communication scientometrics and bibliometrics research

Abstract

Despite the growth of Open Access, potentially illegally circumventing paywalls to access scholarly publications is becoming a more mainstream phenomenon. The web service Sci-Hub is amongst the biggest facilitators of this, offering free access to around 62 million publications. So far it is not well studied how and why its users are accessing publications through Sci-Hub. By utilizing the recently released corpus of Sci-Hub and comparing it to the data of ~28 million downloads done through the service, this study tries to address some of these questions. The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely made up of recently published articles, with users disproportionately favoring newer articles and 35% of downloaded articles being published after 2013. These results hint that embargo periods before publications become Open Access are frequently circumnavigated using Guerilla Open Access approaches like Sci-Hub. On a journal level, the downloads show a bias towards some scholarly disciplines, especially Chemistry, suggesting increased barriers to access for these. Comparing the use and corpus on a publisher level, it becomes clear that only 11% of publishers are highly requested in comparison to the baseline frequency, while 45% of all publishers are significantly less accessed than expected. Despite this, the oligopoly of publishers is even more remarkable on the level of content consumption, with 80% of all downloads being published through only 9 publishers. All of this suggests that Sci-Hub is used by different populations and for a number of different reasons, and that there is still a lack of access to the published scientific record. A further analysis of these openly available data resources will undoubtedly be valuable for the investigation of academic publishing.

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References

2015The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era 2016The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review 2014The Number of Scholarly Documents on the Public Web 2017Gold, green, and black open access 2016A study of institutional spending on open access publication fees in Germany 2017The need for citizen science in the transition to a sustainable peer-to-peer-society

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2017Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature 2017US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub 2020Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia 2023On the culture of open access: the Sci-hub paradox 2020The case of significant variations in gold–green and black open access: evidence from Indian research output 2018Grades of Openness: Open and Closed Articles in Norway 2019Same Question, Different World: Replicating an Open Access Research Impact Study

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