Described as the “Napster” of scholarly publishing, the popularity of the Sci-Hub website reflects researchers’ frustration with the inaccessibility of journal papers behind paywalls. Now, one of the first academic studies of the platform, which offers free use of millions of articles, suggests that publishers’ responses to the open access movement are proving ineffective, too.

Bastian Greshake, doctoral student in applied bioinformatics at Goethe University Frankfurt, found that 35 per cent of articles downloaded from Sci-Hub were less than two years old when they were accessed.

He said this indicated that publishers’ minimum embargo periods – which keep papers behind paywalls for a year or two before they are made freely available – were unlikely to halt the spread of “guerrilla open access” platforms.

Mr Greshake's paper, “Looking into Pandora’s Box: the content of Sci-Hub and its usage”, says that recently published articles were “highly sought for” and that embargoes were “being surpassed more and more [by] black open access”.

“Readers of scientific publications are interested in the findings right away, not after two years, and thus are willing to use alternative means of circumventing the paywalls imposed," Mr Greshake told Times Higher Education. “The embargo solutions are not a viable strategy.”



Sci-Hub was set up in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakhstani graduate student and computer programmer, who was frustrated by the cost of accessing the multiple academic papers she needed for her own scholarly research. It provides free access to around 62 million journal articles and, in a six-month period from September 2015 to February 2016, it facilitated 28 million downloads.

Mr Greshake's research, published on open access platform F1000Research, also found that less than 10 per cent of the journals on Sci-Hub are responsible for more than 50 per cent of the content. Within the downloaded content the view is even more extreme, with less than 1 per cent of all journals getting more than half of all downloads. This shows that academic publishing is “even more of an oligopoly” than suggested previously, Mr Greshake argues.

“Both corpus and downloaded publications are heavily skewed towards a set of few publishers, with the nine most abundant publishers having published [about] 70 per cent of the complete corpus and [about] 80 per cent of all downloads respectively,” he states. “The general picture of a few publishers dominating the market, with around 50 per cent of all publications being published through only three companies, is even more pronounced at the usage level compared to the complete corpus, perpetuating the trend of ‘the rich getting richer’.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sci-Hub’s disruption of publishing has proved contentious and Elsevier sued it for “irreparable damages and copyright infringement”. However, a survey published in Science last year suggested that scholars who had not yet used Sci-Hub would not be averse to doing so, with more than 80 per cent saying they would have “no qualms”.

“Sci-Hub fills a niche that exists when it comes to accessing the academic literature, as there’s a large number of people who, for various reasons, don’t have access to the literature they want (or need) to read,” Mr Greshake told THE. “In that sense I think it becomes clear that the claim that ‘everyone who needs access can get it’, sometimes made by publishers, can’t be supported.”

john.elmes@timeshighereducation.com