Out of interest, is sci-hub generally available to get a copy of for...research purposes?
[0] https://gizmodo.com/archivists-want-to-make-sci-hub-un-censo...
from my lived experience, this request has been seen as absurd and invalidated by many because their lived experience is always having feeds of papers and abstracts they can start from. or how they see a browser extension that doesn’t do what I’m asking at all to be good enough (there’s some that automatically give you the scihub link to any paper you are looking at, which still puts me at square one, which paper?).
its a pretty basic feature though.
there is a link there to 851 torrents , ~77TB of data (compressed zip files), and also an index (sql db dump)
That's pretty crazy to think about, even if you consider overhead and multimedia assets like images often included in PDFs. I remember the old "the library of congress fits on this CDROM" analogies (which wasn't entirely true) but this takes it to a whole new level.
At some point, it seems like in research, it will be far easier to skip the lit review and just do the work then later if you do the same work someone else did, compare results for consistency. We may yet get through the hurdle of the reproducibility crisis due to the deluge of information. The underlying issue though is, because you couldn't find the related effort that caused you to independently attempt to replicate the effort, you may also never find all the duplicate efforts to compare for consistency.
PDF is fairly inefficient compared to formats like DVI (and consider that so many papers are produced using TeX anyway, though figures may be in various image formats.)
But 77TB? You could host the whole thing in a shoebox with nine 8TB flash drives, a 10-socket powered USB hub, and a Raspberry Pi.
Someone really needs to build Shoe-Hub.