[dhimmel]

Nice article on the history of Shadow Libraries. They've come a long way since their Russian roots in the 90s.

We just released a study titled "Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature". Preprint at https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3100. There's an accompanying interactive browser at https://greenelab.github.io/scihub.

Some highlights:

> As of March 2017, we find that Sci-Hub's database contains 68.9% of all 81.6 million scholarly articles, which rises to 85.2% for those published in closed access journals.

> Coverage also varies by publisher, with the coverage of the largest publisher, Elsevier, at 97.3%.

> we estimate that over a six-month period in 2015–2016, Sci-Hub provided access for 99.3% of valid incoming requests.