Category Archives: oa.u.penn

Scholarly Communication Survey Results on Open Access Themes – Teaching, Research & Learning

Posted on by

“Of the 309 people who answered this survey question, 94% were in favor of implementing an open access policy at Penn, with 68% strongly in favor. Of those 309, 188 (61%) had never heard of or used ScholarlyCommons, but the percent in favor was nearly identical – 93% in favor, with 68% strongly in favor.

Looking at specific populations, faculty (tenured and tenure track) closely followed this pattern (93% in favor, with 62% strongly in favor), and all 68 graduate students who answered this question were in favor of an open access policy, with none opposed….”

Research: Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature | eLife | Daniel Scott Himmelstein et al.

Posted on by

“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 85.1% 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, we find that Sci-Hub provides greater coverage than the University of Pennsylvania, a major research university in the United States. Green open access to toll access articles via licit services, on the other hand, remains quite limited. 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 may become unsustainable.”