Sci-Hub's remarkable coverage of scholarly literature & the future of publishing by Daniel Himmelstein

"The website Sci-Hub provides access to scholarly literature via fulltext PDF downloads. The site enables users to access articles that would otherwise be paywalled. In March, Sci-Hub tweeted the identifiers (DOIs) for all articles in their repository. By integrating this dataset with a catalog of scholarly literature, we assessed Sci-Hub's coverage and found that Sci-Hub contains 86% of articles in toll-access journals. This number rises to 96% for recently-cited articles. We suggest the ubiquity of Sci-Hub will disrupt scholarly publishing. Specifically, toll access publishing will no longer be a viable business model. We provide evidence that the transition is already underway and urge the community to adopt libre open access as an alternative. This study was performed openly on GitHub at https://github.com/greenelab/scihub. A preprint is available at https://doi.org/b9s5."