Sci-Hub and the future of publishing

Event details:

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 2017, 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 contained 86% of articles in toll access journals. This number rose to 96% for recently-cited articles. In fact, Sci-Hub contained more toll access articles than were electronically available from University of Pennsylvania's libraries, despite Penn's annual subscription expenditures of $13 million US.

Legal suits by publishers have been unable to curb Sci-Hub's adoption. 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 and is published at https://doi.org/ckcj.

Biography:

Daniel Himmelstein is a postdoctoral fellow in the Greene Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. His research integrates public data to help understand human disease.

Daniel is also a proponent for open science and has done several projects to improve openness and communication in science. These projects include investigating publishing delays at journals, legal issues regarding data reuse, the license choices of preprint authors, and most recently the coverage of Sci-Hub.

Previously, Daniel received his PhD in Biological & Medical Informatics from the University of California, San Francisco. This is Daniel's first time to Switzerland.

Himmelstein DS, Romero AR, Levernier JG, Munro TA, McLaughlin SR, Greshake Tzovaras B, Greene CS. (2018) Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature. eLife DOI: 10.7554/eLife.32822

Ⓐ 2011-09-05: created by Alexandra Elbakyan, the Sci-Hub website goes live

2013-03-20: Sci-Hub switches to using LibGen as a repository to cache articles.

Ⓑ 2015-01-04: LibGen domain name registrations expire after site administrator dies from cancer.

Ⓒ 2015-06-03: Elsevier files a civil suit against Sci-Hub and LibGen in the U.S. District Court for Southern NY.

Ⓓ 2015-10-30: Elsevier is granted a preliminary injunction to suspend domain names. Bye sci-hub.org

Ⓔ 2016-02-10: “Meet the Robin Hood of Science” by Simon Oxenham

Alexandra Elbakyan

Ⓕ 2016-04-29: “Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone” by John Bohannon in Science

Ⓗ 2016-04-29: Elsevier wins a default judgement ordering defendants to pay Elsevier $15 million.

Ⓘ 2016-06-23: The American Chemical Society files suit against Sci-Hub in the Eastern District of Virginia..

Ⓚ 2017-09-05: Sci-Hub blocks access to Russian IP addresses due to disputes with the scientific establishment.

2017-11-03: ACS wins suit against Sci-Hub

• Ordered that any person or entity in active concert or participation with Defendant Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of ACS’s trademarks or copyrighted works.
• Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) filed an amicus brief (rejected) regarding the suits targeting of "Neutral Service Providers"
• ACS Mission: To advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people.

Ⓛ December 2017: Search interest spikes as domains are suspended after ACS judgement.

But what scholarly articles are not in Sci-Hub?

• There are 10 DOI Registration Agencies
• Crossref has registered 67% of all DOIs in existence
• In March 2015, 99.9% of English Wikipedia DOI links were registered via Crossref
• 90% of newly published articles in the sciences have DOIs
• Catalog of 87,542,370 DOIs
• cAsE InSENSITive

Preprint at https://doi.org/b9s5

49% of 2.8 million articles

85% of 54 million articles

• Extracted DOI citations from OpenCitations
• Recent studies (since 2015) had 6,252,279 outgoing citations to articles in toll access journals
• 96.2% in Sci-Hub

Coverage of cited articles

Data from "The State of OA" Study https://doi.org/gbqtxd

Sci-Hub's coverage by category of article access

University of Pennsylvania Libraries

• Founded by open science pioneer Benjamin Franklin in 1749
• Endowment of $10 billion
• $1.29 billion spent on research in 2016
• Penn Libraries spent $13.13 million on electronic resources in 2017
  • 7.3 million articles
  • 860 thousand ebook chapters
• Average per-download cost of $1.61

PennText

• Alma library resource management system from Ex Libris
• PennText correctly identified access status for 88% of articles
• Half of the articles PennText claimed not to have access to, it did

https://github.com/greenelab/library-access

Sci-Hub versus Penn Libraries

https://github.com/greenelab/library-access

Sci-Hub download logs

While this study had a number of interesting aspects, its virtual lack of success as a tool for reducing the library's journal budget was largely due to the fact that the overall problem was seen by everyone concerned as a library problem. As such, the only solution available to the library in 1981 was to use monograph and binding funds to help offset the shortfall in the serials and journals budget. While the biology and chemistry libraries were spared drastic cuts because of very generous support from divisional funds, Caltech's engineering libraries were extremely hard hit, and only now after nearly seven years have they recovered (just in time for the current crisis). It should be pointed out here that from 1974 to 1983 the materials budgets for the departmental libraries were the responsibility of appropriate divisions.

Serials Crisis

Dana Roth (1990) "The Serials Crisis Revisited"

The Serials Librarian. https://doi.org/dvwb7f

Dana Roth (1990) "The Serials Crisis Revisited"

The Serials Librarian. https://doi.org/dvwb7f

Source: Association of Research Libraries. Expenditure Trends in ARL Libraries, 1986–2015

Prices 1986–2015

1. Inflation — 118%
2. Library expenditures — 197%
3. Journal subscriptions — 521%

Libre Open Access

Headlines:

• Science: Sci-Hub’s cache of pirated papers is so big, subscription journals are doomed, data analyst suggest
• Inside Higher Ed: Inevitably Open
• Quartz: A pirating service for academic journal articles could bring down the whole establishment

https://doi.org/b9s5

Sci-Hub  ⇒ open scholarly literature?

Librarians will never drop subscription access & recommend illicit alternatives … ?

What library will continue to subscribe if a growing proportion of articles is available for free elsewhere?
—Tom Reller (2013) Vice President, Elsevier

Defendants’ actions also threaten imminent irreparable harm to Elsevier because it appears that the Library Genesis Project repository may be approaching (or will eventually approach) a level of “completeness” where it can serve as a functionally equivalent, although patently illegal, replacement for ScienceDirect.

—DeMarco, Hirschberg & Sen (2015) Attorneys for Elsevier

100 articles every ecologist should read

Courchamp & Bradshaw (2017) Nature Ecology & Evolution https://doi.org/cf8f

Changing times? Thus far since 2017

• 'read & publish' deals.
  (see https://doi.org/gdhp83)
• Sweden canceled Elsevier subscription (see also Germany, Peru, and Taiwan)
• University of Montreal cut 2,231 journal subscriptions from Taylor & Francis (93%)​
• Universities in the Netherlands dropped OUP subscription
• More at SPARC's cancellation tracker https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/
• Preprint growth
• Funder policies (e.g. Gates Foundation mandates CC BY)

Libre Open Access

Manubot

powering the next generation of scholarly manuscript

Get started at tiny.cc/manubot

https://github.com/greenelab/manubot-rootstock

Write markdown

2. Continuous integration rebuilds the manuscript

3. Continuous deployment back to GitHub

Pull requests for manuscript collaboration

the future: living but versioned

The Deep Review

• review article on deep learning in precision medicine
• 27 authors from 20 different institutions
• readers appreciate the breadth of perspectives

Questions?

@dhimmel

0000-0002-3012-7446

Packing List
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Slides
https://slides.com/dhimmel/swizterland