TY  - JOUR
A1  - Himmelstein, Daniel S.
A1  - Rodriguez Romero, Ariel
A1  - Levernier, Jacob
A1  - Munro, Thomas Anthony
A1  - McLaughlin, Stephen Reid
A1  - Tzovaras, Bastian Greshake
A1  - Greene, Casey S.
T1  - Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature
T2  - eLife
N2  - 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.
KW  - Feature article
KW  - sci-hub
KW  - open access
KW  - copyright
KW  - journals
KW  - libgen
KW  - paywalls
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50864
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-508641
SN  - 2050-084X
N1  - Copyright Himmelstein et al. 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.
N1  - Erster Preprint erschienen in: PeerJ preprints, 5.2017, e3100v1, doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.3100v1; 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
VL  - 7
IS  - e32822
SP  - 1
EP  - 22
PB  - eLife Sciences Publications
CY  - Cambridge
ER  -