In increasing numbers, researchers around the world are turning to Sci-Hub, the controversial website that hosts 50 million pirated papers and counting. Now, with server log data from Alexandra Elbakyan, the neuroscientist who created Sci-Hub in 2011 as a 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan, Science addresses some basic questions: Who are Sci-Hub's users, where are they, and what are they reading? The Sci-Hub data provide the first detailed view of what is becoming the world's de facto open-access research library. Among the revelations that may surprise both fans and foes alike: Sci-Hub users are not limited to the developing world. Some critics of Sci-Hub have complained that many users can access the same papers through their libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead—for convenience rather than necessity. The data provide some support for that claim. Over the 6 months leading up to March, Sci-Hub served up 28 million documents, with Iran, China, India, Russia, and the United States the leading requestors.

Sci-Hub download dataThese data include 28 million download request events from the server logs of Sci-Hub from 1 September 2015 through 29 February 2016. The uncompressed 2.7 gigabytes of data are separated into 6 data files, one for each month, in tab-delimited text format.scihub_data.zipIPython Notebook for Sci-Hub raw dataIPython Notebook used to process the raw server log data (processing the GIS files into CSV, scraping DOI metadata, etc.).Sci-Hub.htmlSci-Hub.ipynbSci-Hub publisher DOI prefixesData scraped from the CrossRef website which can be used to replicate the analysis of downloads by publisher.publisher_DOI_prefixes.csv