[uniqueid]

Sci-Hub is probably the best thing on the internet, but the fact that some rando had to create it doesn't speak well for the state of our world. If humanity weren't dysfunctional, academic institutions would have beaten Elbakyan to the punch back in the 1990s.

[Tenoke]

Sci-Hub is not especially legal so an actual institution isn't really able to create it instead.

[uniqueid]

I expressed myself poorly. The fact that aspects of Sci-Hub are illegal is the reason I wrote the comment. In a perfect world, academic institutions would have combined their efforts to provide a viable equivalent to Sci-Hub legally. Whether that means buying out publishers, or making do with a small selection of existing papers and focusing on future publications, I don't know.

[stared]

Atheism was illegal. Homosexual acts were illegal. Democrasy was illegal. Studying and voting for women was illegal. (And actually all of these are in some places in the world.)

Very often to progress, as a civilization, we need to change what is legal and what is not.

[bsenftner]

That "not being legal" is a corruption, a continued acceptance of lobby dollar bribes to maintain the situation. Or the lawmakers are so capitalistically corrupted they do not see the problem and think paying multiple times for publicly funded research's information is acceptable.