ER&L 2017

A recent bibliometrics study found that 54% of 4.6 million scientific papers from peer-reviewed journals indexed in Scopus during the years 2011-2013 could be downloaded for free on the Internet in April of 2014 (Archambault, et al. 2014). Increasingly, authors and researchers are using more-and-less legal scholarly article sharing services to "take back the literature," or even just to access it more conveniently (Bohannon, 2016). The objective of this study was to evaluate a manageable sample of journal articles across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities for their availability via open access (gold and green), as well as through rogue or pirated versions. Attendees will gain a greater appreciation of the extent of freely available articles through Google Scholar, Google, ResearchGate, and Sci-Hub, and will be challenged to consider how libraries can respond to this major disruption to the scholarly communication ecosystem.