In many American and Canadian universities, you can access research for no extra cost through their portal. At least that is how it was at my university. So the need to use scihub is less urgent even though it is a million times more convenient.
I know people who work at some research institutions funded by the State from my country, Argentina, and it is super common to use SciHub/LibGen to get access to papers, but our situation is not so good regarding having access to them since most of that is generated by the global North.
I think you are right that many downloads are because Sci-Hub is much more convenient than the terrible landing pages of the publishers; only of the tell-tale signs of monopoly is terrible service; NO I DO NOT WANT YOUR SURVEILLANCE CUBE PDF and I do not want an additional click to get to the real PDF.
Still my university in Bonn is reasonably well funded, but we still do not have subscriptions to many journals I regularly need. Even Harvard does not have all journals.
In many American and Canadian universities, you can access research for no extra cost through their portal. At least that is how it was at my university. So the need to use scihub is less urgent even though it is a million times more convenient.
I know people who work at some research institutions funded by the State from my country, Argentina, and it is super common to use SciHub/LibGen to get access to papers, but our situation is not so good regarding having access to them since most of that is generated by the global North.
I think you are right that many downloads are because Sci-Hub is much more convenient than the terrible landing pages of the publishers; only of the tell-tale signs of monopoly is terrible service; NO I DO NOT WANT YOUR SURVEILLANCE CUBE PDF and I do not want an additional click to get to the real PDF. Still my university in Bonn is reasonably well funded, but we still do not have subscriptions to many journals I regularly need. Even Harvard does not have all journals.