Sci-Hub Website and Library Information

You may be aware of a website called Sci-Hub, which is a potentially illegal repository of millions of academic journal articles stored online. Articles posted on this website routinely violate the original copyright agreements set forth by the articles’ authors and journal publishers. University of Florida-affiliated individuals are discouraged from accessing or participating in any Sci-Hub activities, including using this website to access research articles.

For more information about this controversy, see this article from Science Magazine: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone

The University of Florida subscribes to numerous academic journals, free access to which is provided for all University of Florida faculty, staff, and students (http://cms.uflib.ufl.edu/).

The University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries contains (retrieved from http://cms.uflib.ufl.edu/Communications/Libraries_glance):

• Over 5 million print volumes
• 1 million e-books
• 170,522 full-text electronic journals
• 1,000 electronic databases
• Over eleven million pages from the libraries’ collections have been digitized for online public access. Each year 1.2 million pages of archival, photo and textual materials are added. There are over 85,000,000 unique material views annually to the digital collections’ web site.
• 43,648 UF theses and dissertations are available through the libraries. Over 20,000 are available online.

Library-based information (e.g., academic journal articles) may be accessed off-campus by logging on to the Virtual Private Network (VPN). For instructions on how to use the VPN for library access, see: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/login/vpn.html

If the University does not subscribe to a journal you wish to access, or if access to a particular article is restricted, the University facilitates an Interlibrary Loan service (ILL/ILLIAD) to assist patrons in retrieving information. This quick and convenient service results in the delivery of many previously inaccessible articles and book chapters directly to the user free of charge. For instructions on how to use the Interlibrary Loan service, see: http://cms.uflib.ufl.edu/accesssupport/InterlibraryLoan

Additional tutorial videos for popular library topics (e.g., how to locate journals by title and subject, how to renew books online, how to access online journals from off campus) are available at: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/tutorials/catalogtutorials.html