Sci-Hub downloads show countries where pirate paper site is most used
nature.com
nature.com
China: 17
USA: 27
France: 84
Brazil: 13
India: 1.5
Indonesia: 5
Germany: 17
Singapore: 170
Mexico: 8
Iran: 12
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/20-countries-publishing-...
I did it out of personal bias: I use scihub for hobby and work but my scholarly output so far has been 0.
How you choose to normalize the table is probably a good litmus test for how you view science: if you think the goal of science is to generate insight you normalize by population, if you think it's to communicate in the scientific community you normalize by academic activity, if you think it's to advance society you normalize by GPD (or HDI or GPI).
Almost certainly. All the views I listed are valid in their own right, and their proportion probably shifts depending on discipline. Anecdotally papers around health, well-being or fitness seem to reach an audience of people looking for self-improvement, meanwhile machine learning papers seem to be read by people on or for their job a lot. Some other disciplines meanwhile don't seem to reach a notable audience apart from themselves. Which is fine in it's own right.
I would actually love to see statistics on this, but I don't think anyone is in a position to provide them.
For us mere mortals who need to survive (which these papers definitely help), we need to use sci-hub, as the per article fees are huge.
I’m pretty sure the largest downloaders are people from industry rather than academia. I might open 50 papers in one day just to look at the graphs and then read just one. I’d guess the second largest are high school students. They might not read papers very often, but there are a whole lot more of them than academics.
I'm not sure what calculating number of papers downloaded vs. quantity of institutional artifacts of education in a particular country would get you, other than a guess that it's inversely related to the ease of access to papers by a country's institutions i.e. an inverse to subscription numbers.
Per capita is a bit messy, because it's tied up with internet access and wealth/educational inequality, but it also might be useful for that.
I think it's more informative than total volume of articles, but that going further than that is the kind of overkill where you need twenty different numbers to capture all the different slightly different ways you can count the number of potential users. Should you do it versus number of universities? Number of students? Number of faculty? Number of graduates in the general population (who can't get papers otherwise but are qualified to read them)?
Per capita has criticisms about different structural features of countries, but it's pretty hard to improve on without being super careful about how you interpret things. Same with per capita, of course, but at least people kind of understand it. I am not convinced that people really do, few people seem to even know what a median is or why it can be more useful than a mean.
To the people saying that there is a better metric: you are more than welcome to calculate it and post it here.
that seems suspiciously high compared to the other countries. Maybe it's all the VPN users from china?
I was enrolled in a PhD program (engineering) around the time Sci-Hub started, we were lucky enough to have access to most papers we needed thanks to the University agreements with Elsevier, IEEE, etc. I did not hear about Sci-Hub until a bit later, when I needed access to some academic papers but remote access to my university network was very cumbersome. I ended up downloading my OWN papers from Sci-Hub out of pure convenience. I have to say I always had mixed feelings (if not just hostility) towards the academic publishing industry, so I was actually happy my papers were available there.
During pandemic time I decided to enrol in a MBA in the fields of Humanities (because why not). My experience is that Humanity folks are not very aware of Sci-Hub, probably because they are not so tech-savvy in general, but those that discover it are more than happy to count with this extra resource.
Said this, my personal impression is that places like my country are not higher in the chart .. just because Sci-Hub is not better known yet.
You can pretty much always make your own papers available. Some journals are ok with you hosting copies on your personal website, and none of them can legally prevent you from distributing the accepted manuscript, either on your website, things like ResearchGate or repositories like Arxiv.
I don't think we should attribute such action with any negatively connotated words. It is not like they are stealing anything. They are just accessing what should be accessible to anyone anyway.
Yes it is. The fact there was tax payer money involved doesn't mean any contract with the private sector must be free. Up to the people who found the research to require that it should be published in other means. Grant money comes with many conditions and it's usually not one of them. And when it is, it is respected, from my experience.
Access to research is one thing, organising the review process, print layout, marketing another. Most researchers I know share their preprints for free. But the final peer reviewed & laid out product has added value.
The problem is the inflated price that researchers have allowed to be charged for their own product. Partly because many care more about their publication list than about anything else.
Rather than downloading illicit copies out of convenience, one should download preprints, engage in their discussion, seek out open peer review, share personal copies of peer reviewed papers, and contact other researchers for their papers.
We need to build a community of researchers if we want to take the greedy publishers out of the equation.
From my understanding:
- The actual research and writing work and most of the formatting is done by the researchers.
- The reviewing is done by other researchers donating their time, or rather, using work time paid with public money to work for free for these commercial entities.
- Most of the distribution is digital.
What actual work worth 9500 EUR (plus whatever they get from subscriptions, because until everyone goes open access there will still be subscriptions) do those publishers do nowadays?
Gatekeeping, degrading the quality of research and keeping the reproducability crisis going aren't cheap you know.
Take it from this old salt: Them landlubber publishers be tryin' to hornswaggle ya.
How does this caveat not make the analysis useless, unless known VPN exits are filtered--which there was no indication of.
> maybe there's some students who are randomly downloading all papers they're interested in?
You pretty much have to operate that way anyway. There is just too much stuff to do the old-fashioned “read one paper, get its references, and repeat”. It is much better to get many articles, and then sort them by degree of interest using things like abstracts, main figures, conclusions, etc, before reading them fully. It does increase the number of downloads significantly.