[dewey]

I just read the article and your comments here and I'm a bit unsure what's the difference to the Internet Archive. Is it that the IA can archive them but not make them public for legal reasons and The-Eye is more focused on keeping them online and accessible no matter what?

[toomuchtodo]

Yes. It is extremely likely IA has the LibGen corpus archived, but darked (inaccessible), to prevent litigation.

[jacquesm]

There are quite a few such copies, on the 'just in case' principle.