{"id":19372,"date":"2022-02-16T14:24:33","date_gmt":"2022-02-16T12:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/?p=19372"},"modified":"2022-03-19T07:21:44","modified_gmt":"2022-03-19T05:21:44","slug":"sci-hub-shadow-database-use-in-germany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2022\/02\/sci-hub-shadow-database-use-in-germany\/","title":{"rendered":"Sci-Hub shadow database use in Germany"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most recent court ruling here in Munich<\/a> and the Researchgate<\/a> statement<\/a> that the “plaintiffs were not able to comprehensively present the granting of rights in even one of the fifty cases in dispute” let me wonder how frequently shadow databases are being accessed in Germany.<\/p>\n

AFAIK only Sci-Hub but nor Researchgate is providing some insights here as they released access logs<\/a> including a dataset being labeled as “from 2017<\/a>“. It uses anonymized entries and includes geocoding data that can be quickly converted to SQLITE and then analyzed using R<\/p>\n

\r\n#!\/bin\/bash\r\nsqlite3 sci_hub.sqlite3\r\ncreate table log (dt TEXT, DOI TEXT, IP TEXT, User TEXT, Country TEXT, City TEXT, Latitude REAL, Longitude REAL );\r\n.mode tabs\r\n.import 2017.statistics.tab log\r\n.quit\r\n# R\r\ncon <- dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite(), "sci_hub.sqlite3" )\r\nsql <- paste0("SELECT * FROM log WHERE country='Germany'")\r\nGermany <- DBI::dbGetQuery(conGWAS,sql) %>%\r\nmutate(dt = as.Date(dt))\r\n<\/pre>\n
The dataset includes 2.881 K downloads in Germany. Overall daily downloads were around 8 to 10 K and did not exceed 25 K. There were also weekend gaps, indicating a professional use during workdays. The data look reliable as they show also some server outage and robot usage.<\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a>
2017 Sci-Hub downloads in Germany: Time course<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Not unexpected the most frequent download rates were seen in the major university towns. A small district in the North of Marburg was leading the pack with 596K downloads, followed by Munich (243K) and Berlin (222K).<\/p>\n
\"\"<\/a>
2017 Sci-Hub downloads in Germany: Map<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
According to the website there were 921 K German downloads last month (Jan 2022). Extrapolated to 11.052 K by the end of this year this would indicate a nearly 4fold increase over the past 5 years.<\/p>\n\n
 <\/p>\n
\n  CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 15.04.2026<\/span>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The most recent court ruling here in Munich and the Researchgate statement that the “plaintiffs were not able to comprehensively present the granting of rights in even one of the fifty cases in dispute” let me wonder how frequently shadow databases are being accessed in Germany.   CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 15.04.2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3745],"class_list":["post-19372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy-of-science","tag-sci-hub"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19372"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19728,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19372\/revisions\/19728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}