Sci-Hub is a site to access scholar articles that are behind a paywall. The site has been involved in several legal cases such as Elsevier et al. v. Sci-Hub et al. (2005), a lawsuit filled by the American Chemical Society which was lost by default after failing to defend itself, and many other complaints resulting in ISP blockings and domain names being lost.
There is an ongoing lawsuit taking place in India at the Delhi High Court, but its site (working, not working) has been down several times in the last months and the transcript of cases after 2023-09-02 are “unavailable”.
Overall, the future of sci-hub being a legally recognized entity (by India) looks grim based on the available transcripts but, is there another source for the current status of the case?
If sci-hub manages not to lose this (unlikely unfortunately), will they start putting new articles into the database? It hasn’t been updated for several years I believe. Such a shame - accessing these articles is very cost prohibitive. It’s not uncommon to need to access more than 100 articles to write a good scientific paper. Sci-hub has advanced medical and basic scientific research far more than I think most people realize. I would be happy to donate toward their legal fees.
The only reason new articles are not being uploaded is that the judge ordered it. During the case, one of the orders didn’t contain the text for the parties to continue on the agreement and on that day sci-hub uploaded all the accumulated requests (2018-2020~). My guess is that whenever this case is closed, be it as a lose or as a win, sci-hub will resume uploading new articles.
Man, I hope you are right. Kids should be doing poster presentations on Alexandra Elbakyan in grade school. Modern hero.