Category Archives: oa.sci-hub

Which Nationals Use Sci-Hub Mostly?: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

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Abstract:  In the last decade, Sci-Hub has become prevalent among academic information users across the world. Providing thousands of users with millions of uncopyrighted electronic academic resources, this information pirate website has become a significant threat to copyrights in cyberspace. Information scholars have examined the unequal distribution of IP addresses of Sci-Hub users’ nationality and emphasized the high proportion taken by users from the developed countries. This study finds new evidence from Google Scholar. Searching “Sci-Hub.tw” in the academic search engine, the author finds 531 results containing the keyword. Considering the result, the author argues that academic users in South American countries may use Sci-Hub more frequently than their counterparts in the rest of the world. Moreover, users in the Global North also rely on Sci-Hub to complete their research as well. The new evidence on Google Scholar proves the universal use of Sci-Hub across the world.

 

The Library of Alexandra

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“How much does knowledge cost? While that sounds like an abstract question, the answer is surprisingly specific: $3,096,988,440.00. That’s how much the business of publishing scientific and academic research is worth. 

This is the story of one woman’s battle against a global network of academic journals that underlie published scientific research. In 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan had just moved home to Kazakhstan after a disappointing few years trying to study neuroscience in the United States when she landed on an internet forum where a bunch of scientists were all looking for the same thing: access to academic journal articles that were behind paywalls. That’s the moment the very simple, but enormously powerful, website called Sci Hub was born. 

The site holds over 88 million articles and serves up about a million downloads to people in practically every country on the globe. We travel to Kazakhstan to meet the mysterious woman behind it all and to find out what it takes to make everything we know about anything available to anyone anywhere, for free….”

Study: Over 50% of academics admit to pirating research papers

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“More than 50% of academics have used piracy websites like Sci-Hub in order to bypass paywalls for research they want to access, according to a recent study published in arXiv, a preprint server owned by Cornell University. The researchers surveyed more than 3,300 academics to examine why and how they use scholarly piracy websites….

One academic, who spoke to Fast Company on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from their employer, highlighted their own example of using a piracy website. “A depressing use of SciHub is for accessing an article, which I wrote, but in a journal which my current institution doesn’t currently pay for,” they say….”

Outside the library: Early career researchers and use of alternative information sources in pandemic times – Herman – Learned Publishing – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Presents findings from a study into the attitudes and practices of pandemic-era early career researchers (ECRs) in regard to obtaining access to the formally published scholarly literature, which focused on alternative providers, notably ResearchGate and Sci-Hub. The study is a part of the Harbingers project that has been exploring the work lives and scholarly communication practices of ECRs in pre-pandemic times and during the pandemic, and utilizes data from two rounds of interviews with around 170 ECRs from the sciences and social sciences in eight countries. Findings show that alternative providers, as represented by ResearchGate and Sci-Hub, have become established and appear to be gaining ground. However, there are considerable country- and discipline-associated differences. ECRs’ country-specific level of usage of the alternative providers is partly traceable to the adequacy of library provisions, although there are other factors at play in shaping ECRs’ attitudes and practices, most notably convenience and time saving, as well as the fact that these platforms have become embedded in the scholarly dashboard. There is a dearth of evidence of the impact of the pandemic on ECRs’ ways of obtaining scholarly papers.

 

Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline * TorrentFreak

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“Sci-Hub, a shadow library that offers a free gateway to paywalled academic research, has lost control over one of its main domain names. Sci-Hub.se was deactivated by The Internet Foundation in Sweden, which manages the country’s .se domains. The action came without warning and took Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan by surprise.”

Aaron Swartz and His Legacy of Internet Activism

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“To build this future for our society, we need to adopt the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto to inverse the information asymmetry between citizens and Big Tech-Big Government. This can only happen if we build alternative networks of information infrastructures that support these ideas. These information networks can’t be built overnight, but we need to strive towards them. Sci-Hub and LibGen are some examples of these information infrastructures and not only do we need to support them, we need to build more of them.”

Jumping over the paywall: Strategies and motivations for scholarly piracy and other alternatives – Francisco Segado-Boj, Juan Martín-Quevedo, Juan-José Prieto-Gutiérrez, 2022

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Abstract:  Despite the advance of the Open Access (OA) movement, most scholarly production can only be accessed through a paywall. We conduct an international survey among researchers (N??=??3304) to measure the willingness and motivations to use (or not use) scholarly piracy sites, and other alternatives to overcome a paywall such as paying with their own money, institutional loans, just reading the abstract, asking the corresponding author for a copy of the document, asking a colleague to get the document for them, or searching for an OA version of the paper. We also explore differences in terms of age, professional position, country income level, discipline, and commitment to OA. The results show that researchers most frequently look for OA versions of the documents. However, more than 50% of the participants have used a scholarly piracy site at least once. This is less common in high-income countries, and among older and better-established scholars. Regarding disciplines, such services were less used in Life & Health Sciences and Social Sciences. Those who have never used a pirate library highlighted ethical and legal objections or pointed out that they were not aware of the existence of such libraries.

 

Pirate Libraries Remain Popular Among Academics, Research Finds * TorrentFreak

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“Academic publishers have tried various options to shut down Sci-Hub, without the desired result. Thus far, it appears that the site’s reach is only growing. A new study among thousands of researchers finds that the majority use pirate libraries to bypass paywalls. Lack of access is cited as the prime reason but, worryingly, many researchers also find shadow libraries easier to use than legal alternatives….”

 

Balász Bodó: ‘Digital commons are actually reproducing existing power inequalities’ – Open Knowledge Foundation blog

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“OKFN: What does the process of chasing and taking down Z-Library mean for the concept of open knowledge?

Balász Bodó: When I read the news that these two Russian individuals have been detained, I thought, well, history has come to a full circle. I don’t know these people, how old they are, I assume they are in their thirties. But certainly, their parents or their grandparents may have been or could have easily been detained by the Soviet authorities for sharing books that they were not supposed to share. And now, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people are again detained for sharing books – for a different reason, but it’s the same threat, ‘You’re gonna lose your freedom if you share knowledge’. …”

On the culture of open access: the Sci-hub paradox | Research Square

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Abstract:  Shadow libraries have gradually become key players of scientific knowledge dissemination, despite their illegality in most countries of the world. Many publishers and scientist-editors decry such libraries for their copyright infringement and loss of publication usage information, while some scholars and institutions support them, sometimes in a roundabout way, for their role in reducing inequalities of access to knowledge, particularly in low-income countries. Although there is a wealth of literature on shadow libraries, none of this have focused on its potential role in knowledge dissemination, through the open access movement. Here we analyze how shadow libraries can affect researchers’ citation practices, highlighting some counter-intuitive findings about their impact on the Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA). Based on a large randomized sample, this study first shows that OA publications, including those in fully OA journals, receive more citations than their subscription-based counterparts do. However, the OACA has slightly decreased over the seven last years. The introduction of a distinction between those accessible or not via the Sci-hub platform among subscription-based suggest that the generalization of its use cancels the positive effect of OA publishing. The results show that publications in fully OA journals (and to a lesser extent those in hybrid journals) are victims of the success of Sci-hub. Thus, paradoxically, although Sci-hub may seem to facilitate access to scientific knowledge, it negatively affects the OA movement as a whole, by reducing the comparative advantage of OA publications in terms of visibility for researchers. The democratization of the use of Sci-hub may therefore lead to a vicious cycle against the development of fully OA journals.

 

Jumping over the paywall: Strategies and motivations for scholarly piracy and other alternatives

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Abstract:  Despite the advance of the Open Access (OA) movement, most scholarly production can only be accessed through a paywall. We conduct an international survey among researchers (N=3,304) to measure the willingness and motivations to use (or not use) scholarly piracy sites, and other alternatives to overcome a paywall such as paying with their own money, institutional loans, just reading the abstract, asking the corresponding author for a copy of the document, asking a colleague to get the document for them, or searching for an OA version of the paper. We also explore differences in terms of age, professional position, country income level, discipline, and commitment to OA. The results show that researchers most frequently look for OA versions of the documents. However, more than 50% of the participants have used a scholarly piracy site at least once. This is less common in high-income countries, and among older and better-established scholars. Regarding disciplines, such services were less used in Life & Health Sciences and Social Sciences. Those who have never used a pirate library highlighted ethical and legal objections or pointed out that they were not aware of the existence of such libraries.

 

In the Shadow Library · LRB 14 December 2022

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“Last month, Z-Library – one of the world’s most popular ‘shadow libraries’, or unlicensed eBook databases – was shut down by the FBI. Two of its alleged operators, both Russian nationals, were arrested in Argentina on behalf of the US authorities and charged with criminal copyright infringement. Z-Library, which archived 11 million books and 84 million articles, had a good claim to being the largest resource of its kind, and had managed to skirt serious legal action since it first emerged as a replica, or mirror, of Library Genesis (LibGen) in 2009.

After the arrests, most of the domains associated with Z-Library were overwritten by an FBI seizure notice, but the repository was still accessible via Tor and other anonymising browsers. A few days after the official indictment the remaining Z-Librarians realised a statement. They expressed regret at the arrests and apologised to any writers who had ‘suffered’ because of the site, but stuck to the principles that had guided its creation. ‘We believe,’ they wrote, ‘that the knowledge and cultural heritage of mankind should be accessible to all people around the world, regardless of their wealth, social status, nationality [or] citizenship.’ The democratisation of knowledge, they maintained, was Z-Library’s ‘only purpose’. They quoted a few lines from Queen’s ‘The Show Must Go On’, and went silent….”