![]() ![]() ![]() No matter what the business model is, all journals want to keep users on their pages as long as possible. Sci-Hub usage would never be included giving paying authors and their universities that subsidize the OA activity a less than realistic way to quantify usage. That said, initiatives like the STM Sharing Principles and CHORUS, are leveraging the existing infrastructure to connect download histories from various platforms. Now, the same can be said for all the papers in ResearchGate,, and institutional repositories. When papers are downloaded from Sci-Hub and the associated LibGen database, the publisher site loses the download counts. If you don’t think visibility is important to paying authors, you likely weren’t on Twitter much last week when posts such as this were popping up all over the place: PLOS ONE Authors Tout Download Stats In fact, if memory serves, PLOS was the leader in developing article level metrics to show authors exactly what they were paying for. One way to quantify success is to use article level metrics, which will include downloads. I think it’s safe to assume that download counts are being included in tenure and promotion packages. My editorial office gets calls all the time from authors wanting to know how many times their paper has been downloaded. Funder mandates are obvious but there is actually a lot going on with the visibility/citations answer.Ĭonsidering that an author pays model is a transactional experience, it is normal for an author to want to quantify whether they got what they paid for. ![]() Survey after survey shows that when authors are asked why they choose to pay to publish in OA journals, the two most common answers are increased visibility/citations and funder requirements. Many of these reasons are the same for subscription journals and the amount of harm may be more, less, or the same depending on the business model of the journals affected. Today I am offering some thoughts on how Sci-Hub harms OA journals. I really can’t explain that one but if you have a good theory, share it in the comments. So yes, even when people have free access to content under OA models, they are still using Sci-Hub to access OA content. Reviewing just the data from December 2015, I found that over 200 users accessed PLOS ONE content, over 450 users accessed Hindawi content, and a whopping 2,145 users accessed BioMed Central content. Sci-Hub provided usage of their services from 2015 to Science news writer John Bohannon with the full data set. The counter challenge was that open access (OA) journals are immune.Įven though Sci-Hub is billed as providing access to paywalled content, there appear to be thousands of open access articles in the host database. The premise of the conversation was that all journals are harmed by piracy. It all started with a Twitter conversation that I dropped in on. My post today comes to you as many others in the past. ![]()
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