The major journals accessed were Journal of Emergency Nursing 37.5%), American Journal of Medicine 30.0%) and JAMA(27.5%).
ResearchGate offers a simple yet effective end run around restrictive journal access with its "self-archiving repository".
Calls for "open access publishing" have been steadily growing in academic circles, with Dutch commercial publishers Elsevier being boycotted by thousands of academics in protest at perceived profiteering through journal access costs.
The pattern suggests that a significant share of Sci-Hub users are academics or others with traditional journal access.
The Royal Society of Chemistry RSCC) was one of the first chemical society publishers to offer free or low cost archival journal access to developing countries [18].
"I don't agree," says Ivy Anderson, the director of collections for the California Digital Library in Oakland, which provides journal access to the 240,000 researchers of the University of California system.
Whereas more than 50% of respondents said a lack of journal access was the primary reason for turning to Sci-Hub, about 17% picked simple convenience as their top motive and 23% reported doing so mainly because they objected to the profits publishers make suggesting that many respondents in those two categories do have institutional journal access.
Finally, the office's e-commerce initiative is referred to, including the plans to provide better database and patents journal access, electronic fee payment, electronic filing of patent and trade mark applications, and an industrial designs filing and database facility.
The price paid for these subscriptions, £134m, increased by only 31% over the same period, so the price paid per journal accessed actually fell by 32%.
The average number of journal accesses per month in 2015 taken from the BioMed Central website was 43,132.
