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Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-01-01, 00:00 authored by D S Himmelstein, A R Romero, J G Levernier, Thomas Munro, S R McLaughlin, B Greshake Tzovaras, C S Greene
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.

History

Journal

eLife

Volume

7

Article number

e32822

Pagination

1 - 22

Publisher

eLife Sciences Publications

Location

Cambridge, Eng.

ISSN

2050-084X

Language

eng

Publication classification

C Journal article; C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2018, Himmelstein et al.