KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Illegal ‘pirate libraries’, such as Sci-Hub, controversially provide access to journal articles that are otherwise restricted behind a paywall.
- Open access journals themselves may be the unintended victims of this phenomenon, due to the negative impact this unrestricted access has on the open access citation advantage.
While ‘pirate libraries’ such as Sci-Hub seek to challenge and disrupt the traditional academic publishing model, a recent article by Abdelghani Maddi suggests that the site may be inadvertently “perpetuating the current publishing system”.
Maddi and his colleague, David Sapinho, studied the impact of Sci-Hub on the citation of research papers. They calculated ‘citation scores’ for millions of articles from open access, non-open access, and hybrid journals. Critically, they also examined citations of non-open access articles that are available on Sci-Hub, versus those not available via the illegal platform.
Maddi and Sapinho found that Sci-Hub effectively erased the so-called ‘open access citation advantage’, whereby papers published in open access journals are more likely to be cited than those in non-open access journals (due to the accessibility of the full paper). They argue therefore that, in contrast to their stated aims, pirate sites such as Sci-Hub may actually hinder the progress of open access publishing. For instance, due to the perceived kudos of publishing in certain journals, authors may do so even if the journal is not open access, knowing that their work will ultimately be made freely available via illegal pirate sites, and thus cited by fellow researchers. Maddi and Sapinho propose that the victims of pirate platforms are, ultimately, open access journals themselves.
“Although their goal is to promote open access, these types of libraries unwittingly work against the open access movement.”
To overcome this ‘paradox’, Maddi calls on the scientific community, publishers, and policymakers to work together to develop community-led models, such as diamond open access, that provide sustainable and equitable access to research.
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