Sci-Hub Loses Domains and Access to Some Web Services | The Scientist Magazine®

"A few months after the American Chemical Society won its lawsuit against the pirate site, the game of virtual whack-a-mole continues.

Last November, the American Chemical Society (ACS) won its lawsuit against Sci-Hub, a popular pirate site for academic papers. Since then, a number of Sci-Hub’s domains have been suspended, and earlier this month, Cloudflare, a web performance and security company, terminated its service to the site. Even with these problems, some researchers predict that Sci-Hub will continue rising in popularity as it has over the last few years.

Logs of publication downloads from 2017, released by Sci-Hub on January 18, show that, despite the lawsuits from ACS and Elsevier, the site experienced a growth in activity. An analysis of those data, published earlier this month in eLife, reveals that daily downloads on the pirate site steadily increased from approximately 200,000 per day in 2016 to around 600,000 per day by mid-2017.

Last December, however, downloads dropped significantly—to approximately 350,000 per day—around the time that Sci-Hub lost three of its domains, sci-hub.cc, sci-hub.io, and sci-hub.ac. ..."