A pirate site Sci-Hub: Recent trend and usage analytics from Japan

Abstract

Sci-Hub is a pirate site for academic articles. Sci-Hub provides more 64 million academic articles for free. About 85% of the articles that can be downloaded for free from Sci-Hub otherwise require paid access. Sci-Hub therefore infringes upon academic publisher’s copyright. Yet despite the existence of legitimate academic article databases, users from around the world download over 350,000 articles each day from Sci-Hub; almost 3,800 of those daily downloads originate in Japan. In this paper, we first outline the trends pertaining to Sci-Hub. Next, we analyze the Sci-Hub download log data from 2017 and investigate the Sci-Hub Usage in Japan. Comparison of the results with Kuriyama’s (2016) survey reveals that the number of downloads and citations confirmed that Sci-Hub use has increased. We revealed that Open Access articles account for about 20% of Sci-Hub downloads and that about 80% of users use Sci-Hub only once by cookie.