In April of this year, John Bohannon , a freelance journalist working for Science magazine, in cooperation with Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub’s founder, released and analysed 6 months of Sci-Hub download data for the period September 2015-February 2016 (see: Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone). Download data for individual articles and e-book chapters were attributed to country and city level using IP-geolocation.

Since at least part of the Sci-Hub downloads from a university city like Utrecht can be expected to come from download requests from the academic community (with a lower bound of 9%, see part 1 of this blog series), I set out to investigate the case of access versus convenience for the set of Sci-Hub downloads attributed to Utrecht.

Do people use Sci-Hub to get papers they do not otherwise have access to, or do they (also) go to Sci-Hub for convenience: a one-stop shop to get access, without having to navigate library and publisher websites?

Starting from the subset of Sci-Hub download data attributed to The Netherlands that I created from the original dataset, I selected those downloads that were attributed to Utrecht. This resulted in a set of 3437 DOIs (digital object identifiers) for downloaded articles and e-book chapters. A number of DOIs was requested multiple times; after deduplication a set of 2968 DOIs remained. I then converted these to URLs by adding the prefix https://dx.doi.org/

DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf5664 → URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf5664

Calling all DOIs

For this part of my analysis, I focused on availability through publishers – either via our library subscriptions or as Gold Open Access/otherwise free from publisher. I did this by opening all URLs constructed from DOIs, both from inside and outside our institutional IP-range. I checked if the full-text version of the article (or e-book chapter) was available in either case. Information on our library subscriptions is publicly available.

In the Sci-Hub data release, John Bohannon included a lookup table matching DOI prefixes to publishers (e.g. 10.1126 for Science). This table, scraped from the website of CrossRef, made it easier to sort the DOIs by publisher and look them up in batches.

It would likely have been possible to at least partially automate the task of checking all DOIs for full-text availability from publishers, for instance by employing the CrossRef Text and Data Mining API. I did not pursue this for this project, but for even larger datasets, it would definitely be an avenue to explore.

One advantage of manually checking all DOIs was that it allowed a window onto the variety of publisher platform and journal interfaces, with various degrees of ease in getting information on full-text availability. It certainly highlights the issue of ‘convenience’ in the discussion around obtaining access to scientific information.

The results

For each DOI, I noted whether it was available only from within our university IP-range (i.e. through our library subscriptions), also from outside this IP-range (i.e. gold Open Access or otherwise free from publisher) or neither (not available through publisher). Where access was provided by the publisher without subscription, but only after personal registration, I did not count this as free access.

In Table 1 the results are presented, both for the overall Utrecht dataset and broken down by publisher. In total, 2878 of 2968 unique DOIs could be resolved, the others giving error messages.

Overall, 75% of Utrecht Sci-Hub downloads would have been available either through our library subscriptions (60%) or as Gold Open Access/free from publisher (15%). In so far as these downloads were requested by academic users (i.e. affiliated with Utrecht University), use of Sci-Hub for these materials could be seen as ‘convenience’. For the remaining 25%, Sci-Hub use could be seen as a way of getting access to articles that are not freely available through publishers.

As always, the picture is more complicated than that, though. First, since we already established that only a subset of downloads from university cities (up from 9%) can be directly attributed to use from within a university IP-range, it could still be that any Sci-Hub use from within university IP-ranges specifically concerns those materials that are not available through publishers (25% of Utrecht Sci-Hub downloads), thus representing a need for access rather than (just) convenience after all.

Conversely, even if we take into account possible use by academics, including students, from home (where they could also get institutional access by using their university’s proxy or VPN), a large proportion of downloads is likely requested by people outside academia. Unlike academics, who can’t access 25% of material in this Sci-Hub dataset, people outside academia don’t have legal access to up to 85% (depending on personal subscriptions or access through non-university employers). For this group, the conclusion that people primarily revert to Sci-Hub for access reasons also still looms large.

I have so far only looked at availability through publishers, not at Green Open Access. It will be interesting to see how many of requested downloads are (or could be) freely and legally available because a version of the article or book chapter was deposited in an institutional or disciplinary repository, either as a preprint or after publication with a traditional publisher. I plan to do this analysis next (this time hopefully through the use of APIs!) and publish it as part 3 of this series.

Looking at the breakdown across publishers, Table 1 shows large differences between publishers, both in availability of subscription content (blue vs. red bars, reflecting the extent of our library subscriptions) and percentage of material downloaded from Sci-Hub that is available as Gold Open Access/free from publisher (green bars). The fact that for some publishers, a substantial proportion of Sci-Hub downloads concerns Gold Open Access/free from publisher material provides additional support for the ‘convenience’ hypothesis.

Two final remarks: first, in this analysis I have not tried to break down Sci-Hub downloads across disciplines, by looking at journal or article titles. This might be an interesting exercise though. To facilitate this, I have made the list of articles (metadata only, not full text) in the Utrecht subset of the Sci-Hub dataset available in Mendeley. To make this list, I used the Mendeley browser plugin to import article information based on the DOI. While not all DOIs could be retrieved in this way, the collection contains information on 2695 papers, representing 91% of unique Utrecht Sci-Hub downloads.

Finally, the number of Sci-Hub downloads as identified in this dataset is still very much lower than the millions of downloads done yearly through our library journal subscriptions. In this respect, Sci-Hub does not seem to pose a large ‘threat’ to the traditional system of paywalled access, at least not in the context of a large Western European university. Though theoretically this may change with growing awareness of Sci-Hub, the importance of Sci-Hub perhaps predominantly lies in bringing to the fore multiple issues in scholarly publishing, ranging from privileged access to pay-walled articles to a demonstrated need for ease and convenience in accessing scientific literature.