Over 90% of chemistry literature freely available at pirate site
New analysis discovers Sci-Hub holds 69% of the world’s 82 million scholarly articles
More than 92% of chemistry journal papers – most of which are paywalled – are available for free from pirate site Sci-Hub, an analysis has revealed.
Sci-Hub – established by former neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan in September 2011 – provides illegal access to 62 million scholarly papers and books, bypassing paywalls. Elbakyan, who operates the site out of Russia, could not be reached for comment but Sci-Hub did tweet responses to some of the study’s claims on 2 August.
The study, posted before peer review on PeerJ Preprints , identifies chemistry as the most heavily pirated discipline on Sci-Hub, although no field’s coverage is less than 75%. And another study just published has found that less than 20% of chemistry literature is free-to-read.
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On 19 March, Sci-Hub – most popular among researchers in China, India and Iran – released a list of digital object identifiers (DOIs) of all the papers it could successfully find. The authors interrogated this database to discover that Sci-Hub contains nearly 69% of all 81.6 million articles registered in DOI registry Crossref. This number rises to over 85% when taking into account only paywalled content.