Sadly not always. Perhaps 80 % of the papers I try to find are there and perhaps 60 % of the books.
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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I was going to comment that Library Genesis went offline earlier this year, but I'm very happy to see that I'm wrong and it seems to be back.
How large is scihub , if you wanted to download the whole thing?
So about $800 in HDDs. Steep but reasonable for all the knowledge man has acquired so far.
All of human knowledge is not encoded into academia.
Academia is heavily western biased.
Then get digitizing. We have unicode and AI text extraction.
Not every human knowledge is written ;)
I don't think anyone would stop you from writing it down. Could even get a lot of respect for that.
Well personally I can’t because I’m functionally deafmute.
But anyways this is all beside my original point which was that published academia doesn’t contain all of human knowledge.
So write it down...
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted. You're not wrong. Sci-Hub focuses on academic journal articles, which are a pretty novel phenomenon. The first journal was created in the 17th century, and journals didn't become the primary medium for publications until well into the 19th century. I wouldn't say academia is "biased" per se, but it's true that the academic publishing business is heavily dominated by western companies.
I think both statements are true - not all knowledge is recorded by academia, and academia is heavily western biased.
What I suspect is that the down-votes are because the first user was using hyperbole to make a positive comment about our ability to archive these documents and their value. The response points out something that is evident - obviously academic papers do not hold all human knowledge - and shifts the conversation into a not so casual topic of western biases. This sudden shift of the conversation from friendly-casual to geopolitical with little motivation can make some users upset.
OR, as the other person suggested, maybe the mention of 'western bias' is enough to trigger some.
the downvotes are due to the bullshit "bias" claim.
let's you know they're a tankie...
Ah yes, I’m a tankie because I acknowledge the fact academia is dominated by the west? And therefore western epistemologies are favoured.
I hope people stop using tankie as a meaningless word like in this case. And actually for its original meaning, which is so called “communists” who support the brutal repression of states like the soviet union and china. Which I do not.
Or a postmodernist, or someone who knows their history? Or are you conna tell me the Ethiopian view is as represented as the English one?
Unlike wikipedia, they don't offer a full torrent of the site, so it's hard to estimate. I guess the closest point of comparison would be Anna's archive index, since they have a rough filesize total?
I should seed Wikipedia
*If it is older than 2023
I have been more often disappointed by sci-hub than satisfied, but maybe I just tend to look up more obscure or new research.