[maxmalkav]

My opinion is solely based on my personal experience, so take it with a grain of salt.

I was enrolled in a PhD program (engineering) around the time Sci-Hub started, we were lucky enough to have access to most papers we needed thanks to the University agreements with Elsevier, IEEE, etc. I did not hear about Sci-Hub until a bit later, when I needed access to some academic papers but remote access to my university network was very cumbersome. I ended up downloading my OWN papers from Sci-Hub out of pure convenience. I have to say I always had mixed feelings (if not just hostility) towards the academic publishing industry, so I was actually happy my papers were available there.

During pandemic time I decided to enrol in a MBA in the fields of Humanities (because why not). My experience is that Humanity folks are not very aware of Sci-Hub, probably because they are not so tech-savvy in general, but those that discover it are more than happy to count with this extra resource.

Said this, my personal impression is that places like my country are not higher in the chart .. just because Sci-Hub is not better known yet.

[kergonath]

> I have to say I always had mixed feelings (if not just hostility) towards the academic publishing industry, so I was actually happy my papers were available there.

You can pretty much always make your own papers available. Some journals are ok with you hosting copies on your personal website, and none of them can legally prevent you from distributing the accepted manuscript, either on your website, things like ResearchGate or repositories like Arxiv.