Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone
Just as spring arrived last month in Iran, Meysam Rahimi sat
down at his university computer and immediately ran into a problem: how
to get the scientific papers he needed. He had to write up a research
proposal for his engineering Ph.D. at Amirkabir University of Technology
in Tehran. His project straddles both operations management and
behavioral economics, so Rahimi had a lot of ground to cover.
But every time he found the abstract of a relevant paper, he hit a
paywall. Although Amirkabir is one of the top research universities in
Iran, international sanctions and economic woes have left it with poor
access to journals. To read a 2011 paper in Applied Mathematics and
Computation, Rahimi would have to pay the publisher, Elsevier, $28. A
2015 paper in Operations Research, published by the U.S.-based company
INFORMS, would cost $30.
Related content:
- The frustrated science student behind Sci-Hub
Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub to thwart journal paywalls - My love-hate of Sci-Hub
Editorial by Marcia McNutt, Editor-in-Chief, Science suite of journals - It's a Sci-Hub world data set
Data set and details on Sci-Hub server
the papers was going to cost $1000 this week alone—about as much as his
monthly living expenses—and he would probably need to read research
papers at this rate for years to come. Rahimi was peeved. “Publishers
give nothing to the authors, so why should they receive anything more
than a small amount for managing the journal?”
Many academic publishers offer programs to help researchers in poor
countries access papers, but only one, called Share Link, seemed
relevant to the papers that Rahimi sought. It would require him to
contact authors individually to get links to their work, and such links
go dead 50 days after a paper’s publication. The choice seemed clear:
Either quit the Ph.D. or illegally obtain copies of the papers. So like
millions of other researchers, he turned to Sci-Hub, the world’s largest
pirate website for scholarly literature. Rahimi felt no guilt. As he
sees it, high-priced journals “may be slowing down the growth of science
severely.”
The journal publishers take a very different view. “I’m all for
universal access, but not theft!” tweeted Elsevier’s director of
universal access, Alicia Wise, on 14 March during a heated public debate
over Sci-Hub. “There are lots of legal ways to get access.” Wise’s
tweet included a link to a list of 20 of the company’s access
initiatives, including Share Link.
G. Grullón/Science
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?
For someone denounced as a criminal by powerful corporations and
scholarly societies, Elbakyan was surprisingly forthcoming and
transparent. After establishing contact through an encrypted chat
system, she worked with me over the course of several weeks to create a
data set for public release: every download event over the 6-month
period starting 1 September 2015, including the digital object
identifier (DOI) for every paper. To protect the privacy of Sci-Hub
users, we agreed that she would first aggregate users’ geographic
locations to the nearest city using data from Google Maps; no
identifying internet protocol (IP) addresses were given to me. (The data set and details on how it was analyzed are freely accessible)
It's a Sci-Hub world
Server log data for the website Sci-Hub from
September 2015 through February paint a revealing portrait of its users
and their diverse interests. Sci-Hub had 28 million download requests,
from all regions of the world and covering most scientific disciplines.
September 2015 through February paint a revealing portrait of its users
and their diverse interests. Sci-Hub had 28 million download requests,
from all regions of the world and covering most scientific disciplines.
operation of the website, interaction with users, and even her personal
life. Among the few things she would not disclose is her current
location, because she is at risk of financial ruin, extradition, and
imprisonment because of a lawsuit launched by Elsevier last year.
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.
In October last year, a New York judge ruled in favor of Elsevier,
decreeing that Sci-Hub infringes on the publisher’s legal rights as the
copyright holder of its journal content, and ordered that the website
desist. The injunction has had little effect, as the server data reveal.
Although the sci-hub.org web domain was seized in November 2015, the
servers that power Sci-Hub are based in Russia, beyond the influence of
the U.S. legal system. Barely skipping a beat, the site popped back up
on a different domain.
It’s hard to discern how threatened by Sci-Hub Elsevier and other
major publishers truly feel, in part because legal download totals
aren’t typically made public. An Elsevier report in 2010, however,
estimated more than 1 billion downloads for all publishers for the year,
suggesting Sci-Hub may be siphoning off under 5% of normal traffic.
Still, many are concerned that Sci-Hub will prove as disruptive to the
academic publishing business as the pirate site Napster was for the
music industry (see editorial by Marcia McNutt
on her love-hate of Sci-Hub). “I don’t endorse illegal tactics,” says
Peter Suber, director of the Office for Scholarly Communications at
Harvard University and one of the leading experts on open-access
publishing. However, “a lawsuit isn’t going to stop it, nor is there any
obvious technical means. Everyone should be thinking about the fact
that this is here to stay.”
It is easy to understand why journal publishers might see Sci-Hub as a
threat. It is as simple to use as Google’s search engine, and as long
as you know the DOI or title of a paper, it is more reliable for finding
the full text. Chances are, you’ll find what you’re looking for. Along
with book chapters, monographs, and conference proceedings, Sci-Hub has
amassed copies of the majority of scholarly articles ever published. It
continues to grow: When someone requests a paper not already on Sci-Hub,
it pirates a copy and adds it to the repository.
Elbakyan declined to say exactly how she obtains the papers, but she
did confirm that it involves online credentials: the user IDs and
passwords of people or institutions with legitimate access to journal
content. She says that many academics have donated them voluntarily.
Publishers have alleged that Sci-Hub relies on phishing emails to trick
researchers, for example by having them log in at fake journal websites.
“I cannot confirm the exact source of the credentials,” Elbakyan told
me, “but can confirm that I did not send any phishing emails myself.”
So by design, Sci-Hub’s content is driven by what scholars seek. The
January paper in The Astronomical Journal describing a possible new
planet on the outskirts of our solar system? The 2015 Nature paper
describing oxygen on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko? The paper in which
a team genetically engineered HIV resistance into human embryos with
the CRISPR method, published a month ago in the Journal of Assisted
Reproduction and Genetics? Sci-Hub has them all.
It has news articles from scientific journals—including many of mine in Science—as
well as copies of open-access papers, perhaps because of confusion on
the part of users or because they are simply using Sci-Hub as their
all-in-one portal for papers. More than 4000 different papers from
PLOS’s various open-access journals, for example, can be downloaded from
Sci-Hub.
The flow of Sci-Hub activity over time reflects the working lives of
researchers, growing over the course of each day and then ebbing—but
never stopping—as night falls. (There is an 18-day gap in the data
starting 4 November 2015 when the domain sci-hub.org went down and the
server logs were improperly configured.) By the end of February, the
flow of Sci-Hub papers had risen to its highest level yet: more than
200,000 download requests per day.
How many Sci-Hub users are there? The download requests came from 3
million unique IP addresses, which provides a lower bound. But the true
number is much higher because thousands of people on a university campus
can share the same IP address. Sci-Hub downloaders live on every
continent except Antarctica. Of the 24,000 city locations to which they
cluster, the busiest is Tehran, with 1.27 million requests. Much of that
is from Iranians using programs to automatically download huge swaths
of Sci-Hub’s papers to make a local mirror of the site, Elbakyan says.
Rahimi, the engineering student in Tehran, confirms this. “There are
several Persian sites similar to Sci-Hub,” he says. “So you should
consider Iranian illegal [paper] downloads to be five to six times
higher” than what Sci-Hub alone reveals.
The geography of Sci-Hub usage generally looks like a map of
scientific productivity, but with some of the richer and poorer
science-focused nations flipped. The smaller countries have stories of
their own. Someone in Nuuk, Greenland, is reading a paper about how best
to provide cancer treatment to indigenous populations. Research goes on
in Libya, even as a civil war rages there. Someone in Benghazi is
investigating a method for transmitting data between computers across an
air gap. Far to the south in the oil-rich desert, someone near the town
of Sabha is delving into fluid dynamics. Mapping IP addresses to
real-world locations can paint a false picture if people hide behind web
proxies or anonymous routing services. But according to Elbakyan, fewer
than 3% of Sci-Hub users are using those.
In the United States and Europe, Sci-Hub users concentrate where
academic researchers are working. Over the 6-month period, 74,000
download requests came from IP addresses in New York City, home to
multiple universities and scientific institutions. There were 19,000
download requests from Columbus, a city with less than a tenth of New
York’s population, and 68,000 from East Lansing, Michigan, which has
less than a hundredth. These are the homes of Ohio State University and
Michigan State University (MSU), respectively.
The numbers for Ashburn, Virginia, the top U.S. city with nearly
100,000 Sci-Hub requests, are harder to interpret. The George Washington
University (GWU) in Washington, D.C., has its science and technology
campus there, but Ashburn is also home to Janelia Research Campus, the
elite Howard Hughes Medical Institute outpost, as well as the servers of
the Wikimedia Foundation, the headquarters of the online encyclopedia
Wikipedia. Spokespeople for the latter two say their employees are
unlikely to account for the traffic. The GWU press office responded
defensively, sending me to an online statement that the university
recently issued about the impact of journal subscription rate hikes on
its library budget. “Scholarly resources are not luxury goods,” it says.
“But they are priced as though they were.”
Several GWU students confessed to being Sci-Hub fans. When she moved
from Argentina to the United States in 2014 to start her physics Ph.D.,
Natalia Clementi says her access to some key journals within the field
actually worsened because GWU didn’t have subscriptions to them.
Researchers in Argentina may have trouble obtaining some specialty
journals, she notes, but “most of them have no problem accessing big
journals because the government pays the subscription at all the public
universities around the country.”
Even for journals to which the university has access, Sci-Hub is
becoming the go-to resource, says Gil Forsyth, another GWU physics Ph.D.
student. “If I do a search on Google Scholar and there’s no immediate
PDF link, I have to click through to ‘Check Access through GWU’ and then
it’s hit or miss,” he says. “If I put [the paper’s title or DOI] into
Sci-Hub, it will just work.” He says that Elsevier publishes the
journals that he has had the most trouble accessing.
The GWU library system “offers a document delivery system
specifically for math, physics, chemistry, and engineering faculty,” I
was told by Maralee Csellar, the university’s director of media
relations. “Graduate students who want to access an article from the
Elsevier system should work with their department chair, professor of
the class, or their faculty thesis adviser for assistance.”
The intense Sci-Hub activity in East Lansing reveals yet another
motivation for using the site. Most of the downloads seem to be the work
of a few or even just one person running a “scraping” program over the
December 2015 holidays, downloading papers at superhuman speeds. I asked
Elbakyan whether those download requests came from MSU’s IP addresses,
and she confirmed that they did. The papers are all from chemistry
journals, most of them published by the American Chemical Society. So
the apparent goal is to build a massive private repository of chemical
literature. But why?
A lawsuit isn't going to stop [Sci-Hub], nor is there any obvious technical means. Everyone should be thinking about the fact that this is here to stay.Bill Hart-Davidson, MSU’s associate dean for graduate education,
suggests that the likely answer is “text-mining,” the use of computer
programs to analyze large collections of documents to generate data.
When I called Hart-Davidson, I suggested that the East Lansing Sci-Hub
scraper might be someone from his own research team. But he laughed and
said that he had no idea who it was. But he understands why the scraper
goes to Sci-Hub even though MSU subscribes to the downloaded journals.
For his own research on the linguistic structure of scientific
discourse, Hart-Davidson obtained more than 100 years of biology papers
the hard way—legally with the help of the publishers. “It took an entire
year just to get permission,” says Thomas Padilla, the MSU librarian
who did the negotiating. And once the hard drive full of papers arrived,
it came with strict rules of use. At the end of each day of running
computer programs on it from an offline computer, Padilla had to walk
the resulting data across campus on a thumb drive for analysis with
Hart-Davidson.
Yet Sci-Hub has drawbacks for text-mining research, Hart-Davidson
says. The pirated papers are in unstructured PDF format, which is hard
for programs to parse. But the bigger issue, he says, is that the data
source is illegal. “How are you going to publish your work?” Then again,
having a massive private repository of papers does allow a researcher
to rapidly test hypotheses before bothering with libraries at all. And
it’s all just a click away.
While Elsevier wages a legal battle against Elbakyan and Sci-Hub,
many in the publishing industry see the fight as futile. “The numbers
are just staggering,” one senior executive at a major publisher told me
upon learning the Sci-Hub statistics. “It suggests an almost complete
failure to provide a path of access for these researchers.” He works for
a company that publishes some of the most heavily downloaded content on
Sci-Hub and requested anonymity so he could speak candidly.
For researchers at institutions that cannot afford access to
journals, he says, the publishers “need to make subscription or purchase
more reasonable for them.” Richard Gedye, the director of outreach
programs for STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technical
and Medical Publishers, disputes this. Institutions in the developing
world that take advantage of the publishing industry’s outreach programs
“have the kind of breadth of access to peer-reviewed scientific
research that is pretty much the equivalent of typical institutions in
North America or Europe.”
And for all the researchers at Western universities who use Sci-Hub
instead, the anonymous publisher lays the blame on librarians for not
making their online systems easier to use and educating their
researchers. “I don’t think the issue is access—it’s the perception that
access is difficult,” he says.
“I don’t agree,” says Ivy Anderson, the director of collections for
the California Digital Library in Oakland, which provides journal access
to the 240,000 researchers of the University of California system. The
authentication systems that university researchers must use to read
subscription journals from off campus, and even sometimes on campus with
personal computers, “are there to enforce publisher restrictions,” she
says.
Will Sci-Hub push the industry toward an open-access model, where
reader authentication is unnecessary? That’s not clear, Harvard’s Suber
says. Although Sci-Hub helps a great many researchers, he notes, it may
also carry a “strategic cost” for the open-access movement, because
publishers may take advantage of “confusion” over the legality of
open-access scholarship in general and clamp down. “Lawful open access
forces publishers to adapt,” he says, whereas “unlawful open access
invites them to sue instead.”
Even if arrested, Elbakyan says Sci-Hub will not go dark. She has
failsafes to keep it up and running, and user donations now cover the
cost of Sci-Hub’s servers. She also notes that the entire collection of
50 million papers has been copied by others many times already. “[The
papers] do not need to be downloaded again from universities.”
Indeed, the data suggest that the explosive growth of Sci-Hub is
done. Elbakyan says that the proportion of download requests for papers
not contained in the database is holding steady at 4.3%. If she runs out
of credentials for pirating fresh content, that gap will grow again,
however—and publishers and universities are constantly devising new
authentication schemes that she and her supporters will need to
outsmart. She even asked me to donate my own Science login and
password—she was only half joking.
For Elbakyan herself, the future is even more uncertain. Elsevier is
not only charging her with copyright infringement but with illegal
hacking under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. “There is the
possibility to be suddenly arrested for hacking,” Elbakyan admits.
Others who ran afoul of this law have been extradited to the United
States while traveling. And she is fully aware that another
computer prodigy–turned-advocate, Aaron Swartz, was arrested on similar
charges in 2011 after mass-downloading academic papers. Facing
devastating financial penalties and jail time, Swartz hanged himself.
Like the rest of the scientific community, Elbakyan is watching the
future of scholarly communication unfold fast. “I will see how all this
turns out.”
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf5664
Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone | Science | AAAS
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