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A comment on UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited negative impact (2020). Parent comment

Re:UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited neg... by fao_ on Sunday March 07, 2021 @07:06PM (#26381030)
You would have to get a 10 years before / after comparison for it to prove anything. Also, comparing a university against itself is interesting but not at all noteworthy, for bonus points to make the paper actually useful, you could compare against 10 years of traffic from other universities.

But then, Science magazine did a segment on this: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pir...

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Re:UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited neg... by ImaCake on Sunday March 07, 2021 @07:48PM (#26381258)
You don't really need 10 years. Each researcher at UC might be confounded by their local network, but you could argue that is just a casual variable anyway. As for statistical power, UC has >30 researchers and each one of those researchers would access several papers a week. Take the ratio of sci-hub vs non-sci-hub papers accessed per week or month and compare to the month before UC's contract with elsevier ran out. Take the mean and do a t-test. Don't even need timeseries!

I suspect plotting sci-hub/non-sci-hub papers accessed per week for several weeks before and after the contract expiry would dispense with the need for any statistical analysis.

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Re:UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited neg... by smichel17 on Sunday March 07, 2021 @08:09PM (#26381368)
Or maybe there's been little noise about the change because everyone was using sci-hub already anyway!

I recently introduced a part-time professor to sci-hub, when he was having trouble getting his vpn connection to work, so he could access a paper in a journal. Open access is just easier.

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Re:UC’s termination of Elsevier contract has had limited neg... by sitkack on Sunday March 07, 2021 @08:31PM (#26381493)
Does sci-hub release geographic group-by ? She should, I have a corp all access pass to basically everything, and I still sci-hub.

The racist, classist control of information has to stop. It should basically be a reverse paywall.

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