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

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. Th

SUBMITTER: Greshake B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5428489 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature