How do early career researchers (ECRs) use Sci-Hub and why? In this post David Nicholas assesses early career researcher attitudes towards the journal pirating site, finding a strong preference for Sci-Hub amongst French ECRs. He raises the question, will Sci-Hub prove the ultimate disruptor and bring down the existing status quo in scholarly communications?

When we started the Harbingers Project in 2016 – a longitudinal study of the scholarly communication practices of 116 early career researchers (ECRs) from China, France, Malaysia, Poland, Spain, UK and USA – one of the things we most wanted to discover was whether ECRs, as Millennials, would take to pure-play online, social media friendly platforms, such as ResearchGate (RG). It turned out that they did and in the case of RG, to such an extent that in the space of just three years, it moved from disruptor to mainstream.

However, as surely as night follows day, as one disruptor ceases to disrupt, another emerges. Thus, as the use of RG plateaus, Sci-Hub – not so much a disruptor, as an out and out copyright pirate – has gained increasing traction with ECRs. From finding only a handful of users in 2016, a quarter of our sample now appears to be using the site in 2018. Not bad for an illegal platform, especially so considering researchers are likely to play down participation in an illicit activity. It is possible that the real proportion of users could be as high as a third, if true that would translate to millions of researchers world-wide.

Interestingly, Sci-Hub’s attraction, unlike RG’s, is not its social media features (it has none), but that it offers free and relatively easy access to millions of papers harvested (illegally) from publishers’ websites. It is an open one-stop full-text warehouse, which is thought to be more convenient to use than clunky heavily regulated library platforms.

There is another, possibly, more important explanation for Sci-Hub’s popularity and that is it speaks to ECRs’ sharing beliefs and open access (OA) sympathies. It is, after all, supported by academics with open agendas and/or those protesting against the high costs of journal subscriptions, who provide Sci-Hub with their institutional passwords. Sci-Hub might not have an online community to join, but is has a much better OA offering than RG.

Much of the growth of Sci-Hub is therefore ideological, no more so than in France, where nearly all our ECRs were Sci-Hub users. For French ECRs Sci-Hub was considered to be merely a way of providing open access to the scientific literature: part and parcel of the OA movement, which is to be supported by whatever means necessary. From this perspective, publishers are seen as the enemy, whose greediness erects unnecessary barriers, thereby obstructing the advancement of science. National infrastructures, such as HAL and ISTEX, have been created to break the publishers’ monopoly, but ECRs are wondering whether Sci-Hub (and ResearchGate) can accomplish the task more cheaply and effectively? In fact, Sci-Hub is seen as a ‘Robin Hood’ figure. There then is an element of defiance about the French use of Sci-Hub and they certainly do not view it as being wrong, because they are breaking the rules for good reason, to increase access to scientific knowledge.

ECRs elsewhere lag behind the French in their use of Sci-Hub, although they might be catching-up. Approximately one-third of our Spanish and Polish ECRs use Sci-Hub. Malaysian use is low, but the latest findings indicate growing interest. Sci-Hub users, as a proportion of the total ECR population, are lowest in the UK and US, which is in line with previous findings showing a preference for Sci-Hub outside the Anglosphere. The reason for the low use might be that US/UK university libraries are better provisioned. China, as always, is an interesting and special case, as in China Sci-Hub is banned, but still used by a few ECRs. They also have at their disposal a Sci-Hub clone, which is not banned, www.91lib.com and provides users with access to the offerings of all the main commercial publishers for a small fee. The service is alleged to hack into publishers’ websites or steal library IDs in order to obtain access to journal papers.

In France ECRs refer to Sci-Hub as the ‘Russian’ platform, partly because to escape attempts to close it down it has sheltered its domain in the Russian Federation and partly because its founder comes from Kazakhstan. While we did not cover Russia in the original study, we decided to survey Russian ECRs to ascertain their perceptions of the site. We found, despite a Moscow City Court ruling blocking Sci-Hub on behalf of STM publishers, they are avid users and, like their French counterparts, believe it delivers open science in a simple and free fashion and really don’t care or understand why it is labelled a pirate.

Sci-Hub, more so than RG, therefore seems to have a greater potential for disrupting the current order of things and poses a significant threat to publishers and librarians, who cling to the mistaken belief that the key to Sci-Hub’s success is its alleged seamlessness (a single sign-on), which if they can replicate will go away. As to whether it is the ultimate disruptor, in the short to medium term, the answer is probably, yes. Certainly Sci-Hub is no fly by night platform, as its status among French ECRs proves. Thus, while it would be inaccurate to say that it has widespread support among ECRs, it attracts few negative comments and has a growing number of users.

The bigger question is whether in the longer term Sci-Hub will still exist? The answer is: not in its current form, but, as Napster was for music, it might be the precursor to the collapse of the status quo. However, unlike RG, Sci-Hub does not have the opportunity to sell its platform, there is no advertising, or ‘social networking’ to obtain vital user data that it can monetise; it is a pure and unashamed ‘pirate’.

This blog post is based on the author’s co-written article, Sci-Hub: The new and ultimate disruptor? View from the front published in Learned Publishing.

Image Credit: Free-Photos via Pixabay (Licensed under CC0 licence)

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Impact Blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below

About the author

David Nicholas is a director of CIBER Research Ltd, an independent research company specialising in scholarly communications. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Tennessee. Other members of the Harbingers research group contributed to this blog:, Abrizah Abdullah, Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Blanca Rodríguez Bravo, Marzena Świgoń, Jie Xu, Eti Herman and David Clark