Editor: David Layan
Sci-Hub released the first big update this year! The new version of the website can view more detailed user data, such as real-time user download data, monthly country download rankings, etc. In addition, the "key ring" of the new logo has been changed to a more familiar pattern.
Sci-Hub, known as the "Science Edition of Pirate Bay", ushered in the first major update this year!
Recently, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan tweeted that she has updated Sci-Hub, and users can now view real-time download data, monthly download data, and more.
She also said she would add more content to Sci-Hub in the future.
Another change comes from the logo.
Previously, Sci-Hub's logo was a little crow clutching a key, which may mean the key to open the door of science.
After the update, the logo became like this:
It is not difficult to find that the key ring in the crow's mouth has become a style that we Chinese more familiar with. Perhaps Elbakyan remembered the name of her native country when she was born.
In the past 30 days, China has been the first in the world to download
As Elbakyan tweeted, the update is mainly an update of the details of recent real-time user data, but also a review of the subject classification and publication time distribution of the papers currently included.
In Sci-Hub's database of 88,343,822 research papers, about 80 percent were research articles published in journals, 6 percent were conference proceedings, 5 percent were chapters of books and books, and the rest were other types of articles.
In terms of time distribution, 77% of the articles on Sci-Hub were published between 1980 and 2020, and 36% between 2010 and 2020. Coverage of major scientific publishing institutions is over 95 per cent.
Currently, the total size of the Sci-Hub database is about 100TB.
In terms of the distribution of disciplines covering papers, most of the research articles in the Sci-Hub database (about 25 million) come from journals in medicine and health, followed by chemistry, biology, humanities and social sciences, physics and other fields.
In terms of the number of papers, sci-hub covers the fastest number of papers between 2013 and 2016, because Sci-Hub downloads a large number of published papers from the journal library during these years. After that, most of the downloads are new papers published every year.
The update releases an example of user data: the top countries or regions with the most papers downloaded from Sci-Hub last month ,in order of download size).
(The 13th place in the picture is Taiwan)
It is not difficult to find that The number of downloads from China ranks first in the world, with 337 million downloads in the past 30 days, followed by the United States (126 million), France (80.44 million), Brazil (40.3 million) and other countries.
The scientific version of "Pirate Bay" has gone through ten years of ups and downs
Founded in September 2011, Sci-Hub is dedicated to providing academic journal papers from around the world to users around the world for free, known as the "Science Edition of Pirate Bay"
Sci-Hub is founded by Kazakh programmer Alexandra Elbakyan, whose research areas are computer science and neural engineering. At the age of 12, she created a website dedicated to various robots and virtual animals.
The idea for the Sci-Hub website stemmed from Elbakyan's student experiences while in Kazakhstan. In her opinion, paying more than $30 to access a paper is "pretty crazy" when researchers often need to access dozens or even hundreds of articles.
Currently, Sci-Hub offers free access to more than 87.97 million research papers. It is used by about 500,000 users every day, most of them students and researchers.
The Sci-Hub website still publicly indicates its original intention at the time of its birth:
Papers are the main source of research needs. The widest possible dissemination of research papers and other scientific or educational resources is subject to artificial restrictions under copyright law. These regulations have greatly hindered the development of the human social sciences.
Currently, Sci-Hub provides access to hundreds of thousands of research papers per day, effectively bypassing any paywalls and restrictions.
However, this free model is bound to conflict with the interests of major academic publishing institutions and fee-paying journals. Since its inception, Sci-Hub has faced intense pressure from litigation, with the site being forced to go offline several times and being banned by many governments.
In December 2020, three well-known publishers, Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society (ACS) jointly filed a lawsuit in India.
In the 2,169-page indictment, the publishers pointed to sci-hub and its main source of resources, Libgen, as gross infringement by disseminating papers and publications that require payment to be read without permission, demanding that local network operators in India ban them.
Affected by the Indian lawsuit, in January 2021, Twitter officials announced a permanent ban on Sci-Hub accounts for "violating the platform's policy on counterfeit products" . At the time of the ban, the number of followers of the account exceeded 185,000.
Last May, Elbakyan tweeted that he had received a notification email from Apple informing him that the FBI had asked Apple more than 2 years ago to provide his personal account data for investigation and that Apple had executed the FBI's order as requested.
In the face of all kinds of pressure, Sci-Hub persevered. Last September 5 was the tenth anniversary of Sci-Hub. Elbakyan tweeted with an update of 2.33 million papers to celebrate Sci-Hub's birthday!
The tweet read: "Today is the anniversary of Sci-Hub, which has been in existence for 10 years! I will be celebrating this day with 2,337,229 new articles."
By some count, most of the papers in the 10th Anniversary Update last September came from the world's leading journal publishers: Elsevier 508566; Springer 305,690, Wiley 201556, IEEE 169849, and ACS 109,970.
Looking at it this way, it is no wonder that several major academic publishing institutions have to kill Sci-Hub.
In the face of all kinds of pressure, Elbakyan has never changed his original intention.
Elbakyan is a strong supporter of the open access (OA) movement: She believes that Sci-Hub is the true implementation of the principle of open access in science, which should be open to all, not against a paywall.
Elbakyan has said she was inspired by communist ideals and believed that "co-ownership" of ideas was essential for scientific progress.
In a 2016 interview with Vox, she said, "I like the communist idea that knowledge should be universal and not limited by intellectual property rights. This is especially true for information. Research articles are used in science. But the word communication itself means co-ownership."
In addition, Elbakyan agrees that communism is part of the spirit of science.
Maybe that's what Sci-Hub's update is for.
Resources:
https://globalshakers.com/meet-the-pirate-queen-of-science-alexandra-elbakyan/
https://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2021/9/464821.shtm
https://twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/1469844242998693888
https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/mk46x4/scihub_v_elsevier_wiley_acs_can_scihub_be_shut/