Survey Results from Academic Librarians and Professors on Teaching and Using Pirate Websites

Abstract Millions of full-text articles are downloaded per month using pirate websites. The purpose of this study was to survey professors and academic librarians on their knowledge, usage and teaching of pirate websites to students. A 21-question survey with adapted Likert scale and free text questions was sent to six academic librarian listservs and primary corresponding authors of top ten evolutionary and bioinformatics and computational biology journals since 2019 from Google Scholar rankings. Academic librarians (48%) and professors (60.5%) are not actively teaching about pirate websites. What is taught is how to ethically and legally access full-text articles, not the existence of pirate websites and how to use them. Concerns about espionage, viruses, and malware for affiliated institutions are concerns for professors and librarians. Sci-Hub continues to be the most known of pirate websites. Librarians and professors are satisfied with the selection of journal title offerings from their affiliated institutions, but desire additional resources for their research. Ease of use continues to be a reason why pirate websites are used, and cost in accessing full-text articles continues to be a concern for librarians and professors.