Sci-Hub website allows users to download PDF versions of scholarly articles, including many paid and restricted access documents. Sci-Hub currently has an estimated corpus of 64 million scholarly articles. In other words, it allows access to almost all international academic literature.
Sci-Hub has liberalized article access data from its server logs in 2017. After processing the data, we can see that Sci-Hub provides access to an average of 400,000 valid requests per day.
In this article, data mining is used to offer a detailed analysis of the use of the platform in Spain, with the aim of knowing precisely its level of use and penetration. To do this, among other indicators, the number of downloads and their regional origin are analysed, as well as the identification of academic publishers that accumulate the most downloads and their classification in different areas of knowledge.
The Sci-Hub platform is framed within the open data philosophy, which seeks to make certain types of data freely available to everyone, without restrictions or control mechanisms. Therefore, this study intends to offer tools for the debate between the preservation of copyright and free access to scientific information online, which eliminates limitations in the exchange of knowledge.