Comparative analysis of downloads of articles by Chinese and Russian researchers using Sci-Hub

Approximately 4.4 million articles downloaded by Chinese researchers were identified based on downloads of 28 million articles from September 1, 2015, to February 29, 2016 posted on the Internet by J. Bohannon and A. Elbakyan. They were distributed by publishers of scientific periodicals and cities in comparison with article downloads by Russian researchers. Strongly skewed distributions of these downloads were obtained towards the leading cities and publishers. It is shown that the largest downloads of articles are observed in cities concentrated in the Central, Eastern and Southern provinces of China, as well as in the capital, central and eastern regions of Russia. At the same time, downloading of articles by scientists from the first three cities of China was 1.9 times higher than such downloading for the first three cities of Russia. It is shown that for both countries, the largest number of downloads of articles by their scientists falls on journals published by Elsevier, Springer, American Chemical Society and Wiley Blackwell. At the same time, the downloading of articles by Chinese scientists from the journals of the first three publishing houses was 2.8 times higher than the downloading of articles by Russian scientists from the journals of the same publishers. In conclusion, clustering of publications based on discussions around Sci-Hub has been done Sci-Hub, obtained as a result of a search through Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar. Six clusters of publications were identified, of which the largest were clusters of publications on the legitimacy, ethics, accessibility and countermeasures of Sci-Hub activity. Methods for implementing publishing and library measures to neutralize the activities of scientific piracy are proposed. The first measure was related to the dumping price for the sale of electronic copies of articles by publishers, and the second was related to the creation of an online platform for interlibrary loan of research articles.