Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature

Daniel S Himmelstein; Ariel R Romero; Stephen R McLaughlin; Bastian Greshake Tzovaras; Casey S Greene

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.3100v1

Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature

Daniel S Himmelstein ¹, Ariel R Romero², Stephen R McLaughlin³, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras⁴, Casey S Greene ¹

1 Systems Pharmacology & Translational Therapeutics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States

2 Bidwise, Inc, Miami, Florida, United States

3 School of Information, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States

4 Department of Applied Bioinformatics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.3100v1

Published: 2017-07-20
Accepted: 2017-07-20

Subject Areas: Bioinformatics, Legal Issues, Science and Medical Education, Statistics, Computational Science
Keywords: Sci-Hub, publishing, literature, piracy, data-science, LibGen, journals, open-data, copyright, paywalls

Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article: Himmelstein DS, Romero AR, McLaughlin SR, Greshake Tzovaras B, Greene CS. 2017. Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3100v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3100v1

Abstract

The website Sci-Hub provides access to scholarly literature via full text PDF downloads. The site enables users to access articles that would otherwise be paywalled. Since its creation in 2011, Sci-Hub has grown rapidly in popularity. However, until now, the extent of Sci-Hub's coverage was unclear. As of March 2017, we find that Sci-Hub's database contains 68.9% of all 81.6 million scholarly articles, which rises to 85.2% for those published in closed access journals. Furthermore, Sci-Hub contains 77.0% of the 5.2 million articles published by inactive journals. Coverage varies by discipline, with 92.8% coverage of articles in chemistry journals compared to 76.3% for computer science. Coverage also varies by publisher, with the coverage of the largest publisher, Elsevier, at 97.3%. Our interactive browser at https://greenelab.github.io/scihub allows users to explore these findings in more detail. Finally, we estimate that over a six-month period in 2015–2016, Sci-Hub provided access for 99.3% of valid incoming requests. Hence, the scope of this resource suggests the subscription publishing model is becoming unsustainable. For the first time, the overwhelming majority of scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection.

Author Comment

This preprint is the first release version of this study. The latest (in progress) version of the study is available at https://greenelab.github.io/scihub-manuscript. Comments on or changes to the manuscript can be made via the corresponding repository https://github.com/greenelab/scihub-manuscript.