Sci-Hub stories: Digging into the downloads | Dryad news and views

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-04-30

Summary:

"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 ..."

Link:

https://blog.datadryad.org/2016/04/28/sci-hub-stories/

From feeds:

[IOI] Open Infrastructure Tracking Project » Items tagged with oa.dryad in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)
Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.data oa.repositories.data oa.green oa.sci-hub oa.debates oa.studies oa.repositories oa.studies oa.sci-hub oa.repositories.data oa.repositories oa.piracy oa.new oa.guerrilla oa.green oa.dryad oa.debates oa.data oa.comment

Date tagged:

04/30/2016, 09:05

Date published:

04/30/2016, 05:05