Respected Sir This is related to your post on 'pirate sites'. Recently,I was fortunate enough to be invited to present a paper in SIS 2017 conference held at IICB (CSIR), Kolkata in April 2017 on Guerrilla Open Access. The first technical draft of the paper is already uploaded in academia.edu ( https://www.academia.edu/33946759/Library_Discovery_System_Designing_One_Sto...). You all are requested to comment, if interested. The key facts I found (and deliberated) are as follows: 1. Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com/) reported 13.3 % of total visits to sci-hub is from India (.in domain) and 33.1% from Chaina; 2. Global rank of sci-hub site is 3227 (quite good rank as reported by Alexa.com); 3. The top most referrer sites are – 1) google.com (9.7%); sciencedirect (8.6%); google.co.in (6.9%), nih.gov (3.6%), wiley.com (3.3%); 4. Almost identical statistics are also provided by similarwebs.com 5. During Sept. 2016 – Feb. 2017, similarwebs.com reported 10.20 million visits to sci-hub in compare with 48.60 million visits to sciencedirect 6. John Travis reported in May 6, 2016 (survey conducted during 2106 and 11000 people responded) that “88% overall said it was not wrong to download papers from Guerrilla Open Access” (see: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/survey-most-give-thumbs-pirated-paper... ); 7. John Bohannon reported in April 2016 that the users of sci-hub are from everywhere of the world (see: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-every... ); 8. The datasets/log files as uploaded by Bohannon and Elbakyan in DRYAD (data repository) shows the following - (see http://datadryad.org/bitstream/handle/10255/dryad.114711/Sci-Hub.html?sequen... ) 8.1 ) Download (from Publisher): From Elsevier>9296485; From Springer-Verlag > 5261574; From Nature Publishing Group> 2243762; From Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers> 2138064; From American Chemical Society>1871933; 8.2) Download (by Country): China > 4456076; India > 3414581; Iran> 2631035; Russia>1521434; US>1150963 9. Bastian Greshake conducted a similarity measure with sci-hub downloads and world bank indicators and found one interesting correlation along with the others that “the higher the economic performance of a country, the more people will illegally download scientific publications”. (see https://thewinnower.com/papers/4715-correlating-the-sci-hub-data-with-world-... ) 10. A Harvard researcher reported that the cost of academic journals is rising much faster than the consumer price index (almost 400% increase from 1986 to 2010); (see; https://www.vox.com/2016/2/17/11024334/sci-hub-free-academic-papers) 11. Elsevier reportedly made a constant 37% to 39% profit from 2002 to 2011 (remember half of the covered period is during this global recession) (see: https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-pub... ); 12. The cross publisher single-window access facility of sci-hub is the most sought after feature of retrieval (no research data but my casual interviews with academia in India prompted that in my mind and it explains the popularity of sci-hub in developed block of the world although they have very good journal access system). In view of the above I raised a few questions during the interactive session: 1 Is Dark OA taking over the OA? 2 Is it the problem with the Delayed OA (as we are proving presently in place of Immediate OA)? 3 Is the romanticism of the idea (Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan is considered as Robinhood of Science by young generation researchers) attracting young researchers all over the world? And one heartfelt wish - Alexandra Elbakyan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan) must not face the same fate as Aaron Swartz (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz). Thanks and regards -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay Associate Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, University of Kalyani, Kalyani - 741 235 (WB), India ----------------------------------------------------------------------- On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 10:51 PM, Subbiah Arunachalam < subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com> wrote:
Friends:
An American copyright and IP law professor-librarian has written about 'pirate sites' that provides free access to scientific papers and other scholarly content. It is worth reading.
http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Elsevier-and-Other-Scholarly-Publ...
Best wishes.
Arun http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4398-4658 http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-9925-2009
-- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.