[bscphil]

> Just about everybody in academia knows about it

Just about everybody in academia uses it, too, especially in the case of Scihub. I can't imagine taking the time to actually check whether I have access to some journal when I want to read a paper, let alone jump through all the hoops before you can get a PDF. The first thing we did when my partner's paper was recently published was check to see if it was on Scihub yet. (It was!)

[tripzilch]

I remember, in the early 2000s, going through all the trouble of logging into my university library's proxy portal to get access to certain scientific papers. I probably wouldn't have done that if SciHub was available, and it probably would have opened up my eyes sooner to the fact that most people don't even have access to such a portal. Although, frankly, it was a different web back then and if you were persistent you could actually find anything.