Abstract
Shadow libraries, also known as “pirate libraries”, are online collections of copyrighted publications that have been made available for free without the permission of the copyright holders. They have gradually become key players of scientific knowledge dissemination, despite their illegality in most countries of the world. Many publishers and scientist-editors decry such libraries for their copyright infringement and loss of publication usage information, while some scholars and institutions support them, sometimes in a roundabout way, for their role in reducing inequalities of access to knowledge, particularly in low-income countries. Although there is a wealth of literature on shadow libraries, none of this have focused on its potential role in knowledge dissemination, through the open access movement. Here we analyze how shadow libraries can affect researchers' citation practices, highlighting some counter-intuitive findings about their impact on the Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA). Based on a large randomized sample, this study first shows that OA publications, including those in fully OA journals, receive more citations than their subscription-based counterparts. However, the OACA has slightly decreased over the seven last years. The introduction of a distinction between those accessible or not via the Sci-hub platform among subscription-based suggest that the generalization of its use cancels the positive effect of OA publishing. The results show that publications in fully OA journals are victims of the success of Sci-hub. Thus, paradoxically, although Sci-hub may seem to facilitate access to scientific knowledge, it negatively affects the OA movement as a whole, by reducing the comparative advantage of OA publications in terms of visibility for researchers. The democratization of the use of Sci-hub may therefore lead to a vicious cycle, hindering efforts to develop full OA strategies without proposing a credible and sustainable alternative model for the dissemination of scientific knowledge.
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Acknowledgements
The present paper is a substantially extended version of the contribution (Maddi and Sapinho, 2022b) presented at the 26th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2022), Granada, Spain, 7–9 September 2022. A pre-print version of this manuscript is available on the Research Square platform at: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2357492/v1. The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions that have contributed to the improvement of the quality of the present paper.
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Maddi, A., Sapinho, D. On the culture of open access: the Sci-hub paradox. Scientometrics 128, 5647–5658 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04792-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04792-5