From: Ivy Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 2 May 2016 02:01:15 +0000

Toby,  that's a very perceptive question. I shared the University of
California's download stats with John Bohannon but he didn't use that
information. In 2014, our total ejournal download figure (html+pdf)
was 33 million. We think those numbers are a little skewed because
some publishers take users directly to an html version, and if the
user then selects a pdf, a separate download is counted. We've done
some research on this but haven't been able to devise a consistent
normalization formula.  But still, 30M downloads at just the
University of California, large as we are (250k students and faculty),
makes 47M SciHub downloads look like not such a big deal.  I suspect
it's practically a rounding error in the grand scheme of things.

UC is evidently not a big user of SciHub. Still, my takeaway is that
we'd all be better served by open access if we can figure out the
business models - this is clearly what people want.

Ivy

Ivy Anderson
California Digital Library


> On May 1, 2016, at 5:33 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2016 09:30:25 +0000
>
> This is interesting, but the numbers need to be put into context
> (always a good idea with numbers - to put them in context). I have no
> idea, for example, how many articles are being downloaded from Science
> Direct, JSTOR, or other platforms and repositories in order to gauge
> whether SciHub's 28 million is 'small', 'medium' or 'large'. For what
> it's worth, OECD Publishing's downloads last year were 28 million (so
> we're running at around 50% of SciHub) but our catalogue is much, much
> smaller - we have around 200,000 items on our platform, a far cry from
> SciHub's 50 million. Does anyone (STM, perhaps?) have data on journal
> article downloads worldwide?
>
> However, this data does support a conjecture that we have at OECD: the
> potential audience is always far larger than one thinks. I recently
> had one of our authors say her latest paper would have an audience of
> '200' and she swore blind that it wouldn't be any larger. Based on our
> past performance with similar papers, I reckon we'll reach twice or
> three times that number. This thinking is quite widespread. I was
> recently challenged at a conference, at which I had shared data on the
> growth in accesses to our content following the introduction of our
> freemium publishing model, by someone arguing that OECD content was
> somehow different from scholarly content published in journals and was
> bound to have a larger audience. I countered by stating that 40% of
> OECD populations are now educated to first-degree level as are many in
> non-OECD countries, especially in places like Iran, China and India.
> Therefore, the potential audience that has the skill and ability to
> read a journal article is really very large indeed. The data from
> SciHub seems to be proving the point.
>
> The final anecdote about ease of discovery and access is sobering . .
> . If we (publishers and librarians together) can't get this right,
> especially at subscribing institutions, then we're failing badly. But,
> this brings me back to the first point - the context of this data.
> What is the share of SciHub downloads at subscribing institutions? If
> it becomes significant, then we are failing, if it isn't, then we're
> not.
>
> Toby Green
> Head of Publishing
> OECD
>
>
>> On 29 Apr 2016, at 06:19, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> From: Gary Price <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 3:11 PM
>>
>> From a New Article in Science (No Paywall For This Article).
>> .
>> From Science (NO Paywall):
>> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
>>
>> "But in increasing numbers, researchers around the world are turning
>> to Sci-Hub, which hosts 50 million papers and counting. Over the 6
>> months leading up to March, Sci-Hub served up 28 million documents.
>> More than 2.6 million download requests came from Iran, 3.4 million
>> from India, and 4.4 million from China. The papers cover every
>> scientific topic, from obscure physics experiments published decades
>> ago to the latest breakthroughs in biotechnology. The publisher with
>> the most requested Sci-Hub articles? It is Elsevier by a long
>> shot—Sci-Hub provided half-a-million downloads of Elsevier papers in
>> one recent week.
>>
>> These statistics are based on extensive server log data supplied by
>> Alexandra Elbakyan, the neuroscientist who created Sci-Hub in 2011 as
>> a 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan. I asked her for the data
>> because, in spite of the flurry of polarized opinion pieces, blog
>> posts, and tweets about Sci-Hub and what effect it has on research and
>> academic publishing, some of the most basic questions remain
>> unanswered: Who are Sci-Hub’s users, where are they, and what are they
>> reading?
>>
>> [Clip]
>>
>> The Sci-Hub data provide the first detailed view of what is becoming
>> the world’s de facto open-access research library. Among the
>> revelations that may surprise both fans and foes alike: Sci-Hub users
>> are not limited to the developing world. Some critics of Sci-Hub have
>> complained that many users can access the same papers through their
>> libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead—for convenience rather than
>> necessity. The data provide some support for that claim. The United
>> States is the fifth largest downloader after Russia, and a quarter of
>> the Sci-Hub requests for papers came from the 34 members of the
>> Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the wealthiest
>> nations with, supposedly, the best journal access. In fact, some of
>> the most intense use of Sci-Hub appears to be happening on the
>> campuses of U.S. and European universities."
>>
>> The article includes the following charts/graphs/maps:
>>
>> Sci-Hub Traffic Over Six Months
>> Sci-Hub Traffic, Globally
>> Top Five Cities Where Most Requests Come From (U.S.)
>> Top 10 Most Downloaded Papers on Sci-Hub
>> Most Downloaded Publishers
>>
>> Full Text
>> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone
>>
>> Coverage in the Washington Post
>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/04/28/whos-reading-millions-of-stolen-research-papers-on-the-outlaw-site-sci-hub-now-we-know/
>>
>> "[John] Bohannon [author of the Science article] quoted a George
>> Washington University student saying it was sometimes difficult to
>> access journals his school subscribes to from Google Scholar, a tool
>> viewed as the easiest way to surface relevant papers. But if he puts
>> the paper’s title into Sci-Hub, he said, “It will just work.”
>>
>> __gary
>>
>>
>> Gary D. Price, MLIS
>> Co-Founder and Editor, Library Journal's infoDOCKET
>> Research Director, Global Investigative Journalism Network
>> Information Industry Analyst
>> Librarian