Web sources of literature for teachers and researchers: Practices and attitudes of Croatian faculty toward legal digital libraries and shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub

In this paper, we have explored the extent to which faculty use different web sources of scientific papers, as well as their practices and attitudes related to availability and use of scientific papers. The questionnaire was sent to employees of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Science at University of Zagreb. It was found out that majority of respondents use scientific papers on the web, several times a week. Google Scholar is the most used web portal for finding papers. Also, very popular are Croatian web portals. Pirate web portals (shadow libraries) are the least used, although almost half of respondents use them for various reasons: access to papers is expensive and not available; easy and fast access, etc. Only a small minority of respondents completely or partly agree that they are content with offer of international scientific journals and papers which are available in Croatia through subscription by scientific institutions. Through log analysis method, we also explored which scientific papers are requested in the Sci-Hub pirate web portal by users located in Croatia. Papers from Natural Sciences domain were most requested, while papers from Social Sciences and Humanities domains are not so often requested.