From: Tony Sanfilippo <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2016 08:11:18 -0400

Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed, reports on a new paper published
in College & Research Libraries looking at who uses these sites and
why.

Preprint of the paper in C&RL:

http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2016/02/25/crl16-840.full.pdf+html

Story in Inside Higher Ed:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/16/study-explores-peer-peer-research-sharing-communities

From the C&RL paper:

“If our sample is representative of the sharing population, the
typical user is not a scientist toiling away in the developing world
locked out of the scholarly community due to ‘the cost of knowledge.’
Rather, she is a social or hard science researcher who has academic
library privileges but prefers crowdsourced methods of obtaining
access ….”

From the IHE story:

"Most of the survey respondents said they turn to peer-to-peer sharing
to obtain research because of its convenience. Access and speed
registered as the top reasons, while only 11 of the 148 respondents
said they were motivated by ideology. The respondents who said they
provide pirated articles were slightly more likely to cite ideology --
32 of 104 picked that option -- though more respondents (58) said they
were motivated by a sense that they were giving back to the
peer-to-peer sharing community."

So here's my question about all this. If SciHub starts diluting
library metrics on the use of STEM journal content, will library
budgets start moving back to more spending on Humanities books and
journals?

Tony Sanfilippo, Director
Ohio State University Press
1070 Carmack Road
Columbus, OH 43210-1002
ohiostatepress.org