Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Author and article information
Abstract
The website Sci-Hub enables users to download PDF versions of scholarly articles, including many articles that are paywalled at their journal’s site. Sci-Hub has grown rapidly since its creation in 2011, but the extent of its coverage was unclear. Here we report that, as of March 2017, Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of the 81.6 million scholarly articles registered with Crossref and 85.2% of articles published in toll access journals. We find that coverage varies by discipline and publisher and that Sci-Hub preferentially covers popular, paywalled content. For toll access articles, green open access via licit services is quite limited, while Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than a major research university. Our interactive browser at https://greenelab.github.io/scihub allows users to explore these findings in more detail. For the first time, nearly all scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection, suggesting the toll access business model will become unsustainable.
Cite this as
2018. Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature. PeerJ Preprints 6:e3100v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3100v3Author comment
Version 3 contains several major updates. Journal information was updated to the October 2017 release of Scopus, with additional patches to standardize publisher names, causing many coverage measures to change slightly. We compared Sci-Hub's coverage to the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. The Google Trends, Bitcoin donations, and Sci-Hub access logs analyses were extended through the end of 2017. Finally, we performed revisions in response to peer review at the journal eLife. This version includes a more comprehensive discussion of the subscription publishing model and how Sci-Hub could disrupt it.
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Additional Information
Competing Interests
The authors have no relevant conflicts of interest to report. Ariel Rodriguez Romero is an employee of Bidwise, Inc.
Author Contributions
Daniel S Himmelstein conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Ariel R Romero performed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Jacob G Levernier conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Thomas A Munro performed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Stephen R McLaughlin conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Casey S Greene conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
https://github.com/greenelab/scihub
https://github.com/greenelab/scihub-manuscript
https://github.com/greenelab/library-access
https://github.com/greenelab/scihub-browser-data
https://github.com/dhimmel/scopus
Funding
DSH and CSG were funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Data-Driven Discovery Initiative through Grant GBMF 4552 to CSG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.