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Bibliogifts in L ib G en? A study of a text‐sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing
Author(s) -
Cabanac Guillaume
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23445
Subject(s) - upload , world wide web , crowdsourcing , computer science , dissemination , download , library science , telecommunications
Research articles disseminate the knowledge produced by the scientific community. Access to this literature is crucial for researchers and the general public. Apparently, “bibliogifts” are available online for free from text‐sharing platforms. However, little is known about such platforms. What is the size of the underlying digital libraries? What are the topics covered? Where do these documents originally come from? This article reports on a study of the L ibrary G enesis platform ( L ib G en). The 25 million documents (42 terabytes) it hosts and distributes for free are mostly research articles, textbooks, and books in E nglish. The article collection stems from isolated, but massive, article uploads (71%) in line with a “biblioleaks” scenario, as well as from daily crowdsourcing (29%) by worldwide users of platforms such as R eddit S cholar and S ci‐ H ub. By relating the DOIs registered at C ross R ef and those cached at L ib G en, this study reveals that 36% of all DOI articles are available for free at L ib G en. This figure is even higher (68%) for three major publishers: E lsevier, S pringer, and W iley. More research is needed to understand to what extent researchers and the general public have recourse to such text‐sharing platforms and why.