Since 2021, regular new content uploads to the site have been frozen and some new articles are not available except for some batch releases of content. Įlbakyan responded by questioning the morality of the publishers' business and the legality of their methods in regards to the right to science and culture under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while maintaining that Sci-Hub should be 'perfectly legal.' Publishers have criticized it for violating copyright, reducing the revenue of publishers, and potentially being linked to activities compromising universities' network security, though the cybersecurity threat posed by Sci-Hub may have been exaggerated by publishers. Sci-Hub has been lauded by some in the scientific, academic, and publishing communities for providing access to knowledge generated by the scientific community, which is usually funded by taxpayers (government grants) and with zero royalties paid to the authors.

The site has cycled through different domain names since then. Sci-Hub and Elbakyan were sued twice for copyright infringement in the United States, in 20, and lost both cases by default, leading to loss of some of its Internet domain names. Sci-Hub reported on 15 July 2022 that its collection comprises 88,343,822 files. Sci-Hub has been estimated to contain 95% of all scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls (see Serials crisis).

Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, without regard to copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways.

Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients.

Hosts material without regard to copyright

Mana Leak by Daniel I. Russell