The motivations behind crowdsourced research sharing: An exploration of #icanhazpdf and other communities

There are dedicated spaces across social media platforms devoted to exchanging scholarly publications, such as LibGen, Reddit Scholar, and #icanhazpdf. These exchanges often occur in violation of copyright or terms of service agreements. We wanted to understand what users are requesting? How often? Why are they choosing these methods compared to traditional library-centric means? And what do they think about the potential terms of service (TOS) and copyright violations? This presentation will cover the results from our initial data collection on Twitter (presented at ACRL 2015), supplemented by some analysis of Reddit, to subsequent survey design, data cleaning, and analysis. We’ll also discuss implications for library services and information literacy instruction in light of these peer to peer exchanges. The USC Libraries Research Committee generously funded the license of SPSS for our analysis.