Fast and Furious (at Publishers): The Motivations behind Crowdsourced Research Sharing

Gardner, Carolyn Caffrey; Gardner, Gabriel

doi:10.5860/crl.78.2.131

Cited by 25 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…These findings are in line with prior research into the motivations for crowd-sourced, peer2peer academic file sharing 21 . While embargoes have impact on the use of those publications 22 , these hurdles are being surpassed more and more by Black Open Access 11 , as provided by Sci-Hub .…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Looking into Pandora's Box: The Content of Sci-Hub and its Usage

Greshake

2017

F1000Res

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Despite the growth of Open Access, potentially illegally circumventing paywalls to access scholarly publications is becoming a more mainstream phenomenon. The web service Sci-Hub is amongst the biggest facilitators of this, offering free access to around 62 million publications. So far it is not well studied how and why its users are accessing publications through Sci-Hub. By utilizing the recently released corpus of Sci-Hub and comparing it to the data of ~28 million downloads done through the service, this study tries to address some of these questions. The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely made up of recently published articles, with users disproportionately favoring newer articles and 35% of downloaded articles being published after 2013. These results hint that embargo periods before publications become Open Access are frequently circumnavigated using Guerilla Open Access approaches like Sci-Hub. On a journal level, the downloads show a bias towards some scholarly disciplines, especially Chemistry, suggesting increased barriers to access for these. Comparing the use and corpus on a publisher level, it becomes clear that only 11% of publishers are highly requested in comparison to the baseline frequency, while 45% of all publishers are significantly less accessed than expected. Despite this, the oligopoly of publishers is even more remarkable on the level of content consumption, with 80% of all downloads being published through only 9 publishers. All of this suggests that Sci-Hub is used by different populations and for a number of different reasons, and that there is still a lack of access to the published scientific record. A further analysis of these openly available data resources will undoubtedly be valuable for the investigation of academic publishing.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Looking into Pandora's Box: The Content of Sci-Hub and its Usage

Greshake

2017

F1000Res

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“…Comparing actual usage with the background set of articles shows that articles from recent history are highly sought for, giving some evidence that embargoes prior to making publications Open Access seem to become less effective. These findings are in line with prior research into the motivations for crowd-sourced, peer2peer academic file sharing [21]. While embargoes have impact on the use of those publications [22], these hurdles are more and more surpassed through Black Open Access [11], as provided by Sci-Hub .…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Looking into Pandora’s Box: The Content ofSci-Huband its Usage

Greshake

2017

Preprint

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Despite the growth of Open Access, illegally circumventing paywalls to access scholarly publications is becoming a more mainstream phenomenon. The web service Sci-Hub is amongst the biggest facilitators of this, offering free access to around 62 million publications. So far it is not well studied how and why its users are accessing publications through Sci-Hub. By utilizing the recently released corpus of Sci-Hub and comparing it to the data of˜28 million downloads done through the service, this study tries to address some of these questions. The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely made up of recently published articles, with users disproportionately favoring newer articles and 35% of downloaded articles being published after 2013. These results hint that embargo periods before publications become Open Access are frequently circumnavigated using Guerilla Open Access approaches like Sci-Hub. On a journal level, the downloads show a bias towards some scholarly disciplines, especially Chemistry, suggesting increased barriers to access for these. Comparing the use and corpus on a publisher level, it becomes clear that only 11% of publishers are highly requested in comparison to the baseline frequency, while 45% of all publishers are significantly less accessed than expected. Despite this, the oligopoly of publishers is even more remarkable on the level of content consumption, with 80% of all downloads being published through only 9 publishers. All of this suggests that Sci-Hub is used by different populations and for a number of different reasons, and that there is still a lack of access to the published scientific record. A further analysis of these openly available data resources will undoubtedly be valuable for the investigation of academic publishing.

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“…However, the presence of “unofficial” copies of articles in places such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, or personal author websites indicates that restrictive archiving policies do not necessarily prevent content from being posted online. While outside the scope of this study, it is worth noting that academics also share articles that are not freely available online via sources that are not indexed by Google Scholar, such as SciHub [ 25 ], Twitter (#icanhazpdf), Reddit, and email [ 26 , 27 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accessibility of published research to practicing veterinarians

Page

2018

jmla

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ObjectivesThis study established the percentage of veterinary research articles that are freely available online, availability differences inside and outside of core veterinary medicine publications, sources and trends in article availability over time, and author archiving policies of veterinary journals. This research is particularly important for unaffiliated practitioners who lack broad subscription access and the librarians who assist them.MethodsWeb of Science citation data were collected for articles published from 2000–2014 by authors from twenty-eight accredited US colleges of veterinary medicine. A sample of these articles was searched by title in Google Scholar to determine which were freely available online and their sources. Journals represented in this dataset and a basic list of veterinary serials were cross-referenced with the Sherpa/RoMEO database to determine author archiving policies and the percentage of articles that could potentially be made freely available.ResultsOver half (62%) of the sample articles were freely available online, most of which (57%) were available from publishers’ websites. Articles published more recently were more likely to be freely available. More articles were found to be available in 2017 (62%) than in 2015 (57%). Most (62%) of the included journals had policies allowing authors to archive copies of their articles.ConclusionsMany articles are freely available online, but opportunity exists to archive additional articles while complying with existing copyright agreements. Articles in veterinary medicine–specific journals are less likely to be freely available than those in interdisciplinary journals. Requirements for federally funded research have likely influenced article availability and may continue to do so.

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Fast and Furious (at Publishers): The Motivations behind Crowdsourced Research Sharing

Cited by 25 publications

References 6 publications

Looking into Pandora's Box: The Content of Sci-Hub and its Usage

Looking into Pandora's Box: The Content of Sci-Hub and its Usage

Looking into Pandora’s Box: The Content ofSci-Huband its Usage

Accessibility of published research to practicing veterinarians

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