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Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature
Himmelstein, Daniel S. · Romero, Ariel R. · McLaughlin, Stephen R. · Tzovaras, Bastian Greshake · Greene​, Casey S.

PublishedOctober 2017
JournalPeerJ Preprints
Volume 5, Issue e3100v2, Pages 1-40

ABSTRACT
The website Sci-Hub provides access to scholarly literature via full text PDF downloads. The site enables users to access articles that would otherwise be paywalled. Since its creation in 2011, Sci-Hub has grown rapidly in popularity. However, until now, the extent of Sci-Hub’s coverage was unclear. As of March 2017, we find that Sci-Hub’s database contains 68.9% of all 81.6 million scholarly articles, which rises to 85.2% for those published in toll access journals. Coverage varies by discipline, with 92.8% coverage of articles in chemistry journals compared to 76.3% for computer science. Coverage also varies by publisher, with the coverage of the largest publisher, Elsevier, at 97.3%. Our interactive browser at https://greenelab.github.io/scihub allows users to explore these findings in more detail. We find Sci-Hub preferentially covers popular, paywalled content, containing 96.2% of citations to toll access journals since 2015. For recently requested articles by Unpaywall users, oaDOI provided access to 48.8% whereas Sci-Hub contained 81.5%. Together, oaDOI and Sci-Hub covered 94.1%, demonstrating that gaps in Sci-Hub’s coverage, especially for open access articles, can be filled using licit services. For the first time, nearly all scholarly literature is available gratis to anyone with an Internet connection. Sci-Hub’s scope suggests the subscription publishing model is becoming unsustainable.

Keywords open access articles · open access movement · paywall users · Sci-Hub · subscription publishing model sustainability

RefereedNo
Rightsby/4.0
DOI10.7287/peerj.preprints.3100v2
URLhttps://peerj.com/preprints/3100/
Export optionsBibTex · EndNote · Tagged XML · Google Scholar



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