Sci-hub has been critical to me as I developed the idea for my current startup. If it didn't exist, I could have gotten most of the papers from friends in academia, but it would have been dramatically harder and slower. I use it, I support the concept.

I'll make a slight counterpoint however. It costs between $1-$5k (very rough numbers) to publish in open access journals usually. That's not nothing, but it defrays the management costs that come with a run-of-the-mill journal operation. For more flashy/fancy journals those costs are claimed to be higher (Nature asserts $40k).

Maybe that's inflated, Nature certainly has some incentive to fudge the numbers. Still, I don't think it's that far off considering the volume of submissions (hence # editors), the general press coverage work they do and just putting out a magazine every week with usually about a dozen publications and two dozen original articles.

If we take it at 1/2 that cost, clearly the average lab can't afford $20K to publish. How do we solve that particular issue? Seems we're back to the "how do you finance good journalism/short-turnaround publications?" question. Don't have answers, but want to get opinions.

EDIT: To clarify, I think most publications would be fine under a fairly small contribution, I'm more curious about the very select, super expensive marquee journals.