  For quantum critical spin chains without disorder, it is known that the
entanglement of a segment of N>>1 spins with the remainder is logarithmic in N
with a prefactor fixed by the central charge of the associated conformal field
theory. We show that for a class of strongly random quantum spin chains, the
same logarithmic scaling holds for mean entanglement at criticality and defines
a critical entropy equivalent to central charge in the pure case. This
effective central charge is obtained for Heisenberg, XX, and quantum Ising
chains using an analytic real-space renormalization group approach believed to
be asymptotically exact. For these random chains, the effective universal
central charge is characteristic of a universality class and is consistent with
a c-theorem.
