“Sci‐Hub, which now contains 85% of all paywalled journals, is undoubtedly popular...receiving as it does 200,000 requests a day...with French ECRs being the biggest users.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1206
Apart from the discussion morality/legality also mentioned in the paper
above:
“digital piracy, of which Sci‐Hub is a prime example, is arguably mala prohibita, that is, an act that is technically illegal but not morally wrong,
rather than mala in se, an act that is ‘bad in itself’. Thus, the argument may be, as he puts it…what's genuinely wrong is restricting access to knowledge; copyright piracy
as a method of opening up access to knowledge is not ‘wrong’ – it's merely
illegal’.
