On the culture of open access: the Sci-hub paradox

Abstract

Shadow libraries, also known as "pirate libraries", are online collections of copyrighted publications that have been made available for free without the permission of the copyright holders. They have gradually become key players of scientific knowledge dissemination, despite their illegality in most countries of the world. Many publishers and scientist-editors decry such libraries for their copyright infringement and loss of publication usage information, while some scholars and institutions support them, sometimes in a roundabout way, for their role in reducing inequalities of access to knowledge, particularly in low-income countries. Although there is a wealth of literature on shadow libraries, none of this have focused on its potential role in knowledge dissemination, through the open access movement. Here we analyze how shadow libraries can affect researchers' citation practices, highlighting some counter-intuitive findings about their impact on the Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA). Based on a large randomized sample, this study first shows that OA publications, including those in fully OA journals, receive more citations than their subscription-based counterparts do. However, the OACA has slightly decreased over the seven last years. The introduction of a distinction between those accessible or not via the Scihub platform among subscription-based suggest that the generalization of its use cancels the positive effect of OA publishing. The results show that publications in fully OA journals are victims of the success of Sci-hub. Thus, paradoxically, although Sci-hub may seem to facilitate access to scientific knowledge, it negatively affects the OA movement as a whole, by reducing the comparative advantage of OA publications in terms of visibility for researchers. The democratization of the use of Sci-hub may therefore lead to a vicious cycle, hindering efforts to develop full OA strategies without proposing a credible and sustainable alternative model for the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

Citations in Chemistry at the Dawn of Open Science

“…In 2022, indeed, Maddi and Sapinho reported surprising empirical findings concerning the open access citation advantage (OACA) . In detail, comparing the citation impact of 2,458,378 publications in fully OA journals to that of a control group of non-OA publications over the period 2010–2020, the team found that there is no OACA for publications in fully OA journals and that there is rather a disadvantage.…”

“…Chemistry researchers should not naively assume that publishing in OA journals will automatically translate into increased citations, because Web sites such as Sci-Hub already make their research output published in the international literature openly accessible . It is more beneficial, in this respect, to “green” self-archive all published research articles in a personal academic Web site, thereby offering to colleagues interested in a research chemist’s work a complete and logically ordered outlook of one’s researcher activity.…”

On the peer review reports: does size matter?

“…The selection of these control variables drew from the literature, considering their potential impact on received citations. These variables encompass the journal's impact factor, the number of countries involved in the publication (indicative of international collaboration) (Ni & An, 2018), the number of funders (Quemener et al, 2023;Yan et al, 2018), the publication's openaccess status (Maddi & Sapinho, 2023), the discipline of the publication (Lillquist & Green, 2010), and the publication year (Bornmann, 2013). These variables were integrated into the model to capture and control for potential effects on our dependent variable, citations.…”