TY  - JOUR
A1  - Himmelstein, Daniel S.
A1  - Rodriguez Romero, Ariel
A1  - McLaughlin, Stephen Reid
A1  - Tzovaras, Bastian Greshake
A1  - Greene​, Casey S.
T1  - Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature [v1]
T2  - PeerJ preprints
N2  - 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.
KW  - Sci-Hub
KW  - publishing
KW  - literature
KW  - piracy
KW  - data-science
KW  - LibGen
KW  - journals
KW  - open-data
KW  - copyright
KW  - paywalls
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50865
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-508658
SN  - 2167-9843
N1  - 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.
N1  - Zweiter Preprint erschienen in: PeerJ preprints, 5.2017, e3100v2, doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.3100v2; dritter Preprint erschienen in: PeerJ preprints, 6.2018, e3100v3, doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.3100v3; finale Fassung erschienen in: eLife, 7.2018, e32822, doi:10.7554/eLife.32822
VL  - 5
IS  - e3100v1
PB  - PeerJ Inc.
CY  - Corte Madera, CA [u. a.]
ER  -