Sci-Hub has a founder. A founder that may be sometimes be a benevolent dictator, and sometimes not. For example, very recently, this very founder got offended by Russian social media, in which some academics said something unflattering about her, and a biologist apparently named a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp after her. So she blocked Sci-Hub for all Russian IPs. For about a week. And lifted that ban after a number of humble petitions in Russian social media asking her to change her mind.
To represent everything that is good about the internet, Sci-Hub should have been impersonal. Like archive.org perhaps, or pubmed, or thepiratebay. Unfortunately, it is not.
But it's definitely a good thing we have it, anyway.
Sci-Hub has a founder. A founder that may be sometimes be a benevolent dictator, and sometimes not. For example, very recently, this very founder got offended by Russian social media, in which some academics said something unflattering about her, and a biologist apparently named a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp after her. So she blocked Sci-Hub for all Russian IPs. For about a week. And lifted that ban after a number of humble petitions in Russian social media asking her to change her mind.
To represent everything that is good about the internet, Sci-Hub should have been impersonal. Like archive.org perhaps, or pubmed, or thepiratebay. Unfortunately, it is not.
But it's definitely a good thing we have it, anyway.