The following is a guest post from science journalist John Bohannon. We asked him to give us some background on his recent dataset in Dryad and the analysis of that data in Science. What stories will you find in the data? – EH

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Sci-Hub is the world’s largest repository of pirated journal articles. We will probably look back and see it as inevitable. Soon after it became possible for people to share copyrighted music and movies on a massive scale, technologies like Napster and BitTorrent arrived to make the sharing as close to frictionless as possible. That hasn’t made the media industry collapse, as many people predicted, but it certainly brought transformation.

Unlike the media industry, journal publishers do not share their profits with the authors. So where will Sci-Hub push them? Will it be a platform like iTunes, with journals selling research papers for $0.99 each? Or will Sci-Hub finally propel the industry into the arms of the Open Access movement? Will nonprofit scientific societies and university publishers go extinct along the way, leaving just a few giant, for-profit corporations as the caretakers of scientific knowledge?

There are as many theories and predictions about the impact of Sci-Hub as there are commentators on the Internet. What is lacking is basic information about the site. Who is downloading all these Sci-Hub papers? Where in the world are they? What are they reading?

Sometimes all you need to do is ask. So I reached out directly to Alexandra Elbakyan, who created Sci-Hub in 2011 as a 22 year-old neuroscience graduate student in Kazakhstan and has run it ever since. For someone denounced as a criminal by powerful corporations and scholarly societies, she was quite open and collaborative. I explained my goal: To let the world see how Sci-Hub is being used, mapping the global distribution of its users at the highest resolution possible while protecting their privacy. She agreed, not realizing how much data-wrangling it would ultimately take us.

Two months later, Science and Dryad are publicly releasing a data set of 28 million download request records from 1 September 2015 through 29 February 2016, timestamped down to the second. Each includes the DOI of the paper, allowing as rich a bibliographic exploration as you have CPU cycles to burn. The 3 million IP addresses have been converted into arbitrary codes. Elbakyan converted the IP addresses into geolocations using a database I purchased from the company Maxmind. She then clustered each geolocation to the coordinates of the nearest city using the Google Maps API. Sci-Hub users cluster to 24,000 unique locations.

The big take-home? Sci-Hub is everywhere. Most papers are being downloaded from the developing world: The top 3 countries are India, China, and Iran. But the rich industrialized countries use Sci-Hub, too. A quarter of the downloads came from OECD nations, and some of the most intense download hotspots correspond to the campuses of universities in the US and Europe, which supposedly have the most comprehensive journal access.

But these data have many more stories to tell. How do the reading habits of researchers differ by city? What are the hottest research topics in Indonesia, Italy, Brazil? Do the research topics shift when the Sci-Hub night owls take over? My analysis indicates a bimodal distribution over the course of the day, with most locations surging around lunchtime, and the rest peaking at 1am local time. The animated map above shows just 2 days of the data.

Something everyone would like to know: What proportion of downloaded articles are actually unavailable from nearby university libraries? Put another way: What is the size of the knowledge gap that Sci-Hub is bridging?

Download the data yourself and let the world know what you find.

The data:

http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q447c

My analysis of the data in Science:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone

— John Bohannon