10 Interesting Facts About Sci-Hub

Sci-Hub is an online search engine with over 62,000,000 academic papers and articles available for direct download, bypassing publisher paywalls. New papers are uploaded daily when accessed through educational institution proxies, and papers that have been accessed through Sci-Hub are stored in the LibGen repository.

10 Interesting Facts About Sci-Hub

Sci-Hub was founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011 in Kazakhstan in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. In 2015, academic publisher Elsevier filed a legal complaint against Sci-Hub alleging copyright infringement, and the subsequent lawsuit led to a loss of the original sci-hub.org domain. It stores papers in its own repository, and additionally the papers downloaded by Sci-Hub are also stored in LibGen. In February 2016, the website claimed to serve over 200,000 requests per day. an increase from an average of 80,000 per day before the “sci-hub.org” domain was blocked in 2015. The Sci-Hub website provides access to articles from almost all academic publishers, including Elsevier, Springer/Nature, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, American Chemical Society, Wiley Blackwell, and The Royal Society of Chemistry. It does not require subscriptions or payment to download the full article. The requests for medical literature came mostly from middle- and low-income countries (69%), and the countries with the most requests in absolute numbers were India, China, the USA, Brazil, and Iran. In March 2017, the website had 62 million papers in its collection, which were found to include 85% of the articles published in paywalled scholarly journals. Western institutions such as Harvard and Cornell have had to cut down their access to publications due to ever-increasing subscription costs, potentially causing some of the highest use of Sci-Hub to be in American cities with well-known universities. As per 2019 study, over 27.8 million download requests via Sci-Hub indicates that 23.2 million of these were for journal articles. Also, 4.7 million (22%) of which were articles from medical journals.

Why Researchers Use Sci-Hub though it is illegal?

Many researchers from different parts of the world facing a huge difficulty in downloading peer-reviewed journal articles and books. one of the main reason is that the cost of the journal subscription and lack of funding. when open access journals fail to give enough resources, researchers turning into this kind of sites to download peer-reviewed paid articles.

Many academic publishers offer programs to help researchers in poor countries access papers using a share link.

This method requires researchers to contact authors individually to get links to their work, and such links go dead 50 days after a paper’s publication.

The choice seemed clear: Either they quit the Ph.D. or illegally obtain copies of the papers. So millions of researchers turned to Sci-Hub, the world’s largest pirate website for scholarly literature. due to this, researchers feel no guilt. As they see it, high-priced journals “may be slowing down the growth of science severely.”