Piracy of scientific papers in Latin America

Machin-Mastromatteo, Juan D.; Tirado, Alejandro Uribe; Romero-Ortiz, Maria E

doi:10.1177/0266666916671080

Cited by 28 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Detached from the dissemination behaviour of individual authors is the comprehensive pirate access to content offered by the Sci-Hub website, which retrieves copies of articles from behind paywalls and distributes them for free. Sci-Hub hosts more than 50 million research articles (Machin-Mastromatteo et al 2016). Notably, Himmelstein et al (2017) argue that the subscription-based model is becoming unsustainable because almost the entirety of scholarly research is now freely available thanks to Sci-Hub, but recent literature has addressed limitations and problems of the Sci-Hub initiative as well (Lawson 2017;Priego 2016).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions

null

Polonioli

2018

Scientometrics

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The current state of open access to journal publications within research areas belonging to the humanities has received relatively little research attention. This study provides a detailed mapping of the bibliometric state of open access to journal publications among ethicists, taking into account not only open access publishing in journals directly, but also where and in what form ethicists make their journal articles available elsewhere on the web. As part of the study 297 ethicists affiliated with top-ranking philosophy departments were identified and their journal publication information for the years 2010-2015 were recorded (1682 unique articles). The journal articles were then queried for through Google Scholar in order to establish open access status (web locations, document versions) of each publication record. Publication records belonging to the 20 most frequently used journal outlets (subset of 597 unique articles) were put under closer inspection with regards to alignment with publisher copyright restrictions as well as measuring unused potential to share articles. The results show that slightly over half of recent journal publications are available to read for free. PhilPapers and academic social networks (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) were found to be key platforms for research dissemination in ethics research. The representation of institutional repositories as providers of access was found to be weak, receiving the second lowest frequency rating among the eight discrete web location categories. Further, the study reveals that ethicists are at the same time prone to copyright infringement and undersharing their scholarly work.

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions

null

Polonioli

2018

Scientometrics

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“…Furthermore, half of the 27 institutions studied can offer access to just over 50% of full text “paywalled articles,” a value very close (56%) to that determined in 2011 for seven institutions located in Africa, North and South America, Asia, and Europe (Voronin, Myrzahmetov & Bernstein, 2011) showing that the situation has not improved in recent years. As previously pointed out by Machin-Mastromatteo, Uribe-Tirado & Romero-Ortiz (2016), this shows that, “many universities are unable to acquire subscriptions for years, because they are seriously hindered by budget limitations and the lack of interest and policies from the state for supporting research and access to scientific resources.” Researchers in ophthalmology working in the less privileged institutions are thus in very poor situations. Indeed, although they use “alternative ways” (i.e., PubMeD Central, RG, Google Scholar and ORR) to recover full texts, they are forced to use Sci-Hub if they want to access a sufficient number of full text articles necessary to conduct their research satisfactorily.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Worldwide inequality in access to full text scientific articles: the example of ophthalmology

Boudry

Álvarez-Muñoz

Jorge³

et al. 2019

PeerJ

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BackgroundThe problem of access to medical information, particularly in low-income countries, has been under discussion for many years. Although a number of developments have occurred in the last decade (e.g., the open access (OA) movement and the website Sci-Hub), everyone agrees that these difficulties still persist very widely, mainly due to the fact that paywalls still limit access to approximately 75% of scholarly documents. In this study, we compare the accessibility of recent full text articles in the field of ophthalmology in 27 established institutions located worldwide.MethodsA total of 200 references from articles were retrieved using the PubMed database. Each article was individually checked for OA. Full texts of non-OA (i.e., “paywalled articles”) were examined to determine whether they were available using institutional and Hinari access in each institution studied, using “alternative ways” (i.e., PubMed Central, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and Online Reprint Request), and using the website Sci-Hub.ResultsThe number of full texts of “paywalled articles” available using institutional and Hinari access showed strong heterogeneity, scattered between 0% full texts to 94.8% (mean = 46.8%; SD = 31.5; median = 51.3%). We found that complementary use of “alternative ways” and Sci-Hub leads to 95.5% of full text “paywalled articles,” and also divides by 14 the average extra costs needed to obtain all full texts on publishers’ websites using pay-per-view.ConclusionsThe scant number of available full text “paywalled articles” in most institutions studied encourages researchers in the field of ophthalmology to use Sci-Hub to search for scientific information. The scientific community and decision-makers must unite and strengthen their efforts to find solutions to improve access to scientific literature worldwide and avoid an implosion of the scientific publishing model. This study is not an endorsement for using Sci-Hub. The authors, their institutions, and publishers accept no responsibility on behalf of readers.

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“…Thus, the French are probably more comfortable with the fact that they are using an illegal platform. However, it may turn out that researchers elsewhere are no different: Bohannon's () aforementioned findings, as well as the findings of subsequent studies that replicated his analysis using the same dataset (Elbakyan & Bohannon, ), albeit with different foci (Andročec, ; Babutsidze, ; Machin‐Mastromatteo, Uribe‐Tirado, & Romero‐Ortiz, ; Timus & Babutsidze, ), certainly seem to indicate that this may be the case. Google Trends data, which we have referred to, also seem to lend support to the possibility.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Sci‐Hub: The new and ultimate disruptor? View from the front

Nicholas

Boukacem‐Zeghmouri

et al. 2018

Learned Publishing

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The Harbinger project was a 3‐year‐long international study of the changing attitudes and behaviours of early career researchers (ECRs). One of the aims of the project was to discover if ECRs were adopting disrupting platforms that, legitimately or illegitimately, promote openness and sharing. It has been alleged that such an adoption appeals to them as Millennials. More than 100 ECRs from seven countries were questioned annually, and questions about Sc‐Hub were raised as part of discussions about discovery and access. Interview data were supplemented by desk research and Google Trends statistics. It was found that Sci‐Hub use was increasing and that a quarter of the ECRs now use it, with French ECRs being the biggest users. However, Sci‐Hub is making little headway with ECRs from the UK, USA, Malaysia, and China, although in China's case, this can be explained by it being banned and the country having its own equivalent, http://www.91lib.com. Sci‐Hub is used as much for convenience as necessity; use is not connected to the strength of library provision and and it has been suggested that it represents a bigger threat to publishers than ResearchGate, whose star might be waning.

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Piracy of scientific papers in Latin America

Cited by 28 publications

References 6 publications

Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions

Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions

Worldwide inequality in access to full text scientific articles: the example of ophthalmology

Sci‐Hub: The new and ultimate disruptor? View from the front

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