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Who's Downloading Pirated Scientifc Papers? Everyone (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: In increasing numbers, researchers around the world are turning to Sci-Hub, the controversial website that hosts 50 million pirated papers and counting. Now, with server log data from Alexandra Elbakyan, the neuroscientist who created Sci-Hub in 2011 as a 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan, Science addresses some basic questions: Who are Sci-Hub's users, where are they, and what are they reading? The Sci-Hub data provide the first detailed view of what is becoming the world's de facto open-access research library. Among the revelations that may surprise both fans and foes alike: Sci-Hub users are not limited to the developing world. Some critics of Sci-Hub have complained that many users can access the same papers through their libraries but turn to Sci-Hub instead -- for convenience rather than necessity. The data provide some support for that claim. Over the 6 months leading up to March, Sci-Hub served up 28 million documents, with Iran, China, India, Russia, and the United States the leading requestors.
A big part of the sci-hub access is via Universities which run ezproxy or similar, so their students can access online textbooks, journals, and resource material. The Universities pay significant money to subscribe to these resources. The Sci Hub organization needs credentials at a University to login to the service like ezproxy. At any given time, Sci-Hub have several credentials at several institutions and they can rotate the load so it isn't all put on a few accounts and institutions. Sci-Hub obtain the credentials by phishing the account login data, or in some cases students violate the terms of their agreement with their institution and sell their credentials to Sci-Hub. You can call it "downloading", but it is theft. It is theft of the credentials, theft of the Universities' resources and theft of the online resource material.