Sci-Hub Celebrates 10 Years Of Existence, With A Record 88 Million Papers Available, And A Call For Funds To Help It Add AI And Go Open Source | Techdirt

"To celebrate ten years offering a large proportion of the world's academic papers for free -- against all the odds, and in the face of repeated legal action -- Sci-Hub has launched a funding drive:

Sci-Hub is run fully on donations. Instead of charging for access to information, it creates a common pool of knowledge free for anyone to access.

The donations page says that "In the next few years Sci-Hub is going to dramatically improve", and lists a number of planned developments. These include a better search engine, a mobile app, and the use of neural networks to extract ideas from papers and make inferences and new hypotheses. Perhaps the most interesting idea is for the software behind Sci-Hub to become open source. The move would address in part a problem discussed by Techdirt back in May: the fact that Sci-Hub is a centralized service, with a single point of failure. Open sourcing the code -- and sharing the papers database -- would allow multiple mirrors to be set up around the world by different groups, increasing its resilience...."