Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature

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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 has been 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.

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The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, Philippe Mongeon (2015)

The consolidation of the scientific publishing industry has been the topic of much debate within and outside the scientific community, especially in relation to major publishers’ high profit margins. However, the share of scientific output published in the journals of these major publishers, as well as its evolution over time and across various disciplines, has not yet been analyzed. This paper provides such analysis, based on 45 million documents indexed in the Web of Science over the period 1973-2013. It shows that in both natural and medical sciences (NMS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH), Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis increased their share of the published output, especially since the advent of the digital era (mid-1990s). Combined, the top five most prolific publishers account for more than 50% of all papers published in 2013. Disciplines of the social sciences have the highest level of concentration (70% of papers from the top five publishers), while the humanities have remained relatively independent (20% from top five publishers). NMS disciplines are in between, mainly because of the strength of their scientific societies, such as the ACS in chemistry or APS in physics. The paper also examines the migration of journals between small and big publishing houses and explores the effect of publisher change on citation impact. It concludes with a discussion on the economics of scholarly publishing.

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Open access: The true cost of science publishing.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Daniel S Himmelstein:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3012-7446

Casey S Greene:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8713-9213

Peter A Rodgers: Role: Reviewing Editor

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): eLife

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Elife

Journal ID (publisher-id): eLife

Title: eLife

Publisher: eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd

ISSN (Electronic): 2050-084X

Publication date (Electronic, pub): 01 March 2018

Publication date Collection: 2018

Volume: 7

Electronic Location Identifier: e32822

Affiliations

[1 ]deptDepartment of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics University of Pennsylvania PhiladelphiaUnited States

[2 ]Bidwise, Inc MiamiUnited States

[3 ]deptLibrary Technology Services and Strategic Initiatives University of Pennsylvania PhiladelphiaUnited States

[4 ]deptSchool of Life and Environmental Sciences Deakin University MelbourneAustralia

[5 ]deptSchool of Information University of Texas at Austin AustinUnited States

[6 ]deptDepartment of Applied Bioinformatics, Institute of Cell Biology and Neuroscience Goethe University FrankfurtGermany

[7 ]deptDepartment of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics University of Pennsylvania PhiladelphiaUnited States

eLife United Kingdom

Author information

Daniel S Himmelstein https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3012-7446

Ariel Rodriguez Romero https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2290-4927

Jacob G Levernier https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1563-7314

Thomas Anthony Munro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3366-7149

Stephen Reid McLaughlin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9888-3168

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9925-9623

Casey S Greene https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8713-9213

Article

Publisher ID: 32822

DOI: 10.7554/eLife.32822

PMC ID: 5832410

PubMed ID: 29424689

SO-VID: 5443fdb5-92ef-4232-9be7-44e0b708bbc0

License:

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

History

Date received : 18 October 2017

Date accepted : 08 February 2018

Custom metadata

Author impact statement The availability of almost all articles from toll access journals in the Sci-Hub repository will disrupt scholarly publishing towards more open models.

ScienceOpen disciplines: Life sciences

Keywords: sci-hub,open access,copyright,journals,libgen,paywalls,none

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Life sciences

Keywords: sci-hub, open access, copyright, journals, libgen, paywalls, none