IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jinfst/v73y2022i9p1336-1355.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Free access to scientific literature and its influence on the publishing activity in developing countries: The effect of Sci‐Hub in the field of mathematics

Author

Listed:
  • Kilian Buehling
  • Matthias Geissler
  • Dorothea Strecker

Abstract

This paper investigates whether free access to scientific literature increases the participation of under‐represented groups in scientific discourse. To this end, we aggregate and match data tracing access to Sci‐Hub, a widely used black open access (OA) repository or shadow library, and publication data from the Web of Science (WoS). We treat the emergence of Sci‐Hub as an exogenous event granting relatively unrestricted access to publications, which are otherwise hidden behind a paywall. We analyze changes in the publication count of researchers from developing countries in a given journal as a proxy for general participation in scientific discourse. Our results indicate that in the exemplary field of mathematics, free access to academic knowledge is likely to improve the representation of authors from developing countries in international journals. Assuming the desirability of greater international diversity in science (e.g., to generate more original work, reproduce empirical findings in different settings, or shift the research focus toward topics that are overlooked by researchers from more developed countries), our findings lend evidence to the claim of the OA movement that scientific knowledge should be free and widely distributed.

Suggested Citation

  • Kilian Buehling & Matthias Geissler & Dorothea Strecker, 2022. "Free access to scientific literature and its influence on the publishing activity in developing countries: The effect of Sci‐Hub in the field of mathematics," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 73(9), pages 1336-1355, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:73:y:2022:i:9:p:1336-1355
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.24636
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24636
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.24636?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Michael D. Gordon, 1979. "Deficiencies of scientific information access and output in less developed countries," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 30(6), pages 340-342, November.
    2. Henry Laverde-Rojas & Juan C. Correa, 2019. "Can scientific productivity impact the economic complexity of countries?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(1), pages 267-282, July.
    3. Richard Van Noorden, 2013. "Half of 2011 papers now free to read," Nature, Nature, vol. 500(7463), pages 386-387, August.
    4. Wagner, Caroline S. & Whetsell, Travis A. & Mukherjee, Satyam, 2019. "International research collaboration: Novelty, conventionality, and atypicality in knowledge recombination," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(5), pages 1260-1270.
    5. Sarah Cummings & Paul Hoebink, 2017. "Representation of Academics from Developing Countries as Authors and Editorial Board Members in Scientific Journals: Does this Matter to the Field of Development Studies?," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 29(2), pages 369-383, April.
    6. Richard Van Noorden, 2013. "Open access: The true cost of science publishing," Nature, Nature, vol. 495(7442), pages 426-429, March.
    7. Kenneth Arrow, 1962. "Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention," NBER Chapters, in: The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors, pages 609-626, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Olle Persson & Wolfgang Glänzel & Rickard Danell, 2004. "Inflationary bibliometric values: The role of scientific collaboration and the need for relative indicators in evaluative studies," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 60(3), pages 421-432, August.
    9. Jack E. James, 2020. "Pirate open access as electronic civil disobedience: Is it ethical to breach the paywalls of monetized academic publishing?," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 71(12), pages 1500-1504, December.
    10. Klaus Jaffe & Mario Caicedo & Marcos Manzanares & Mario Gil & Alfredo Rios & Astrid Florez & Claudia Montoreano & Vicente Davila, 2013. "Productivity in Physical and Chemical Science Predicts the Future Economic Growth of Developing Countries Better than Other Popular Indices," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(6), pages 1-10, June.
    11. Sakiru Adebola Solarin & Yuen Yee Yen, 2016. "A global analysis of the impact of research output on economic growth," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(2), pages 855-874, August.
    12. Farid Dahdouh-Guebas & J. Ahimbisibwe & Rita Van Moll & Nico Koedam, 2003. "Neo-colonial science by the most industrialised upon the least developed countries in peer-reviewed publishing," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 56(3), pages 329-343, March.
    13. Huang, Mu-Hsuan & Dong, Huei-Ru & Chen, Dar-Zen, 2012. "Globalization of collaborative creativity through cross-border patent activities," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 226-236.
    14. Guillaume Cabanac, 2016. "Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text-sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(4), pages 874-884, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ismail Ragab Osman & Hendy Abdullah Hendy Ahmed, 2024. "Bibliometric analysis of Sci-Hub downloads by Egyptian researchers," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(4), pages 2371-2388, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Tânia Pinto & Aurora A. C. Teixeira, 2024. "Research output and economic growth in technological laggard contexts: a longitudinal analysis (1980–2019) by type of research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 129(3), pages 1197-1230, March.
    2. Chadi Azmeh, 2022. "Quantity and quality of research output and economic growth: empirical investigation for all research areas in the MENA countries," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(11), pages 6147-6163, November.
    3. Tânia Pinto & Aurora A. C. Teixeira, 2020. "The impact of research output on economic growth by fields of science: a dynamic panel data analysis, 1980–2016," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 123(2), pages 945-978, May.
    4. Mauricio Alviar & Andrés García-Suaza & Laura Ramírez-Gómez & Simón Villegas-Velásquez, 2021. "Measuring the Contribution of the Bioeconomy: The Case of Colombia and Antioquia," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-26, February.
    5. Chaocheng He & Jiang Wu & Qingpeng Zhang, 2021. "Characterizing research leadership on geographically weighted collaboration network," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(5), pages 4005-4037, May.
    6. Klaus Jaffe & Enrique ter Horst & Laura H Gunn & Juan Diego Zambrano & German Molina, 2020. "A network analysis of research productivity by country, discipline, and wealth," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(5), pages 1-15, May.
    7. Iryna Kalenyuk & Liudmyla Tsymbal, 2021. "Assessment of the intellectual component in economic development," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 4793-4816, June.
    8. Muammer Maral, 2024. "Research performance of higher education in OECD countries: A hybrid multi-criteria decision-making approach," SAGE Open, , vol. 14(2), pages 21582440241, June.
    9. Candelon, Bertrand & Joëts, Marc & Mignon, Valérie, 2024. "What makes econometric ideas popular: The role of connectivity," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 53(7).
    10. Pablo Jack & Jeremias Lachman & Andrés López, 2021. "Scientific knowledge production and economic catching-up: an empirical analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(6), pages 4565-4587, June.
    11. Dongqing Lyu & Kaile Gong & Xuanmin Ruan & Ying Cheng & Jiang Li, 2021. "Does research collaboration influence the “disruption” of articles? Evidence from neurosciences," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(1), pages 287-303, January.
    12. António Osório & Lutz Bornmann, 2021. "On the disruptive power of small-teams research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(1), pages 117-133, January.
    13. Chen, Wei & Yan, Yan, 2023. "New components and combinations: The perspective of the internal collaboration networks of scientific teams," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 17(2).
    14. Juan C. Correa & Henry Laverde-Rojas & Julian Tejada & Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, 2022. "The Sci-Hub effect on papers’ citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(1), pages 99-126, January.
    15. Henry Laverde-Rojas & Juan C. Correa, 2019. "Can scientific productivity impact the economic complexity of countries?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 120(1), pages 267-282, July.
    16. Tânia Pinto & Aurora Teixeira, 2023. "Does scientific research output matter for Portugal’s economic growth?," GEE Papers 0174, Gabinete de Estratégia e Estudos, Ministério da Economia, revised Jul 2023.
    17. Hamid Sepehrdoust & Mohsen Tartar & Razieh Davarikish, 2021. "Does Scientific Productivity Stimulate Intensified Technology Exports in Developing Economies," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 12(4), pages 2111-2135, December.
    18. Tan Ngoc Vu & Duc Hong Vo & Michael McAleer, 2019. "Rent seeking for export licenses: Application to the Vietnam rice market," Documentos de Trabajo del ICAE 2019-13, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Instituto Complutense de Análisis Económico.
    19. Weber, Karl Matthias & Giesecke, Susanne & Havas, Attila & Schartinger, Doris & Albiez, Andreas & Horak, Sophia & Blind, Knut & Bodenheimer, Miriam & Daimer, Stephanie & Shi, Liu & Stadler, Maria & Sc, 2024. "Social innovation - (Accompanying) instrument for addressing societal challenges?," Studien zum deutschen Innovationssystem 10-2024, Expertenkommission Forschung und Innovation (EFI) - Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation, Berlin.
    20. Vertova, Giovanna, 2002. "A historical investigation of the geography of innovative activities," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 259-283, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jinfst:v:73:y:2022:i:9:p:1336-1355. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.