Access to scientific literature from Sci-Hub
Analysis and thoughts on downloads from Argentina
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24215/23143924e022Keywords:
Sci-Hub, piracy, open access, scientific papers, copyright, ArgentinaAbstract
The commercialization of scientific information and the payment walls for access have become one of the most debated issues in the last decades. The international open access movement has proposed ways to improve access and, and also, different actors have promoted other strategies such as pirate sites for data downloading. In this paper we study the use of Sci-Hub in Argentina based on a quantitative analysis of the download statistics available until 2017. We detect general, editorial and thematic patterns of use of the documents and investigate common and differentiating aspects with respect to global and other Latin American countries. We also determine, from different samples, if the articles accessed are also available in open access and/or their access is possible through subscriptions paid by the national government through the Electronic Library of Science and Technology (BECyT). We found that downloads from Argentina represent just over 1% of those registered worldwide, that there is a great dispersion of requested titles and that there is a significant increase in use with respect to the same periods in 2015 and 2016. With the different samples we could observe that articles of restricted access published by the editorial companies that manage the sector as an oligopoly are being downloaded mostly in magazines indexed in the so-called "mainstream" and that correspond to the area of medicine (oncology, pediatrics and cardiovascular medicine). Also, we detected a significant number of downloads of articles that were already available in open access, indicating a possible lack of knowledge of these resources and we calculate a significant increase compared to the use of BECyT. We concluded that downloads from Argentina have similar patterns to the rest of the world and that the increase in their use shows that a more radical change is needed to guarantee the right of access to information. As long as scientific information remains a commodity, it is essential to deepen the study of the different projects that allow us to reappropriate knowledge.
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