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Does Sci-Hub actually have all the papers or are they just retrieving them on-demand? Publishers are tracking mass downloads (see the Aaron Swartz case) so giv

Does Sci-Hub actually have all the papers or are they just retrieving them on-demand? Publishers are tracking mass downloads (see the Aaron Swartz case) so given some of the very obscure papers I've retrieved from Sci-Hub I assume it's unlikely they downloaded them beforehand. My go-to assumption for how it works is that a bunch of people have donated access to their university network access and Sci-Hub is just a load-balancing / cache layer.

philipkglass 9y ago
Yes, it lazy-loads papers using credentials from institutional subscribers and then stores them for fast retrieval. When you're the first person to request a paper you'll see an animation of a biphenyl molecule rotating while the site fetches the paper from an institution with access. Sometimes, there is no corresponding institution with access currently hooked up to sci-hub and the retrieval process fails. But I've only seen that happen a few times.