Main

Natalia Timus Babutsidze Zakaria

Abstract

Open Science has gained a lot of attention not only within the academic community but also among policy-makers. Some international publishers have been active in moving towards open access publications and research data, but, overall, modest results have been achieved so far. In this context, the digital piracy engines emerge as vital actors in disseminating and determining the impact of research. This study examines the Sci-Hub downloads data in order to uncover patterns of piracy in European Studies research. We identify journals and the subjects of articles that have been pirated the most. We also study the geographical distribution of download requests. The analysis reveals that the readers are mostly interested in subjects reflecting the current major European challenges, specifically populism and the economic crisis. Both developing countries as well as the ‘old’ EU members are active in illegal downloads.

Details

Article Keywords

Open science, Open access, European Studies, Downloads, Piracy

Section
Commentary
Article Copyright
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Material published in the JCER is done so under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with copyright remaining with the author.
  • Articles published online in the JCER cannot be published in another journal without explicit approval of the JCER editor.
  • Authors can 'self-archive' their articles in digital form on their personal homepages, funder repositories or their institutions' archives provided that they link back to the original source on the JCER website. Authors can archive pre-print, post-print or the publisher's version of their work.
  • Authors agree that submitted articles to the JCER will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the JCER.
Further information about archiving and copyright are contained within the JCER Open Access Policy.