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Wed, 08 Jul 2020

Sci-Hub Downloads Boost Article Citations -- And Help Academic Publishers
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Techdirt readers know that Sci-Hub is a site offering free online access to a large proportion of all the scientific research papers that have been published -- at the time of writing, it claims to hold 82,605,245 of them. It's an incredible resource, used by millions around the world. Those include students whose institutions can't afford the often pricey journal subscriptions, but also many academics in well-funded universities, who do have institutional access to the papers. The latter group often prefer Sci-Hub because it provides what traditional academic publishers don't: rapid, frictionless access to the world's knowledge. Given that Sci-Hub does the job far better than most publishers, it's no wonder that the copyright industry wants to shut down the service, for example by getting related domains blocked, or encouraging the FBI to investigate Sci-Hub's founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, for alleged links to Russian intelligence.These legal battles are likely to continue for some time -- the copyright industry rarely gives up, even when its actions are ineffective or counterproductive. Academics don't care: ultimately what they want is for people to read -- and, crucially, to cite -- their work. So irrespective of the legal situation, an interesting question is: what effect do Sci-Hub downloads have on article citations? That's precisely what a new preprint, published on arXiv, seeks to answer. Here's the abstract:

Citations are often used as a metric of the impact of scientific publications. Here, we examine how the number of downloads from Sci-hub as well as various characteristics of publications and their authors predicts future citations. Using data from 12 leading journals in economics, consumer research, neuroscience, and multidisciplinary research, we found that articles downloaded from Sci-hub were cited 1.72 times more than papers not downloaded from Sci-hub and that the number of downloads from Sci-hub was a robust predictor of future citations.
The paper explains which journals were selected, and the various analytical approaches that were applied in order to obtain this result. In all, the researchers compared 4,646 articles that were downloaded from Sci-Hub to 4,015 from the same titles that were not downloaded. Assuming that those are representative, and that the statistical calculations are correct, the end result is important. It suggests that articles that are downloaded from Sci-Hub are nearly twice as likely to be cited as those that aren't -- a big boost that will doubtless be of great interest to academics, whose careers are greatly affected by how widely they are cited. It seems to confirm that Sci-Hub does indeed help spread knowledge, not just in terms of the free downloads it offers, but also by virtue of leading to more citations for downloaded papers, and thus a wider audience for them.The new paper notes a rather paradoxical implication of the result. Alongside Sci-Hub, which is happy to operate outside copyright law, there are alternatives like open access journals, and preprints, which are fully within it. However, as a result of Sci-Hub's ability to boost citations:
[it] may help preserve the current publishing system because the lack of access to publications, which preprints and open access journals are trying to solve, may no longer be felt so strongly to find required increasing support.
In other words, according to this latest analysis, it turns out that the copyright industry is attacking a site whose success might be seen as a reason for not changing the current academic publishing system.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

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