Hiya,
Well, I definitely agree with your sentiment in a normative sense that scientific papers should be free and readily accessible to all -- in part because a lot of it is funded through tax dollars!
But given the current state of affairs, we're looking at making that information accessible to people without having to pay exorbitant fees to access individual research. We also offer steep discounts for students or anyone in academia.
With that in mind I would push back a little that we're just a scientific paper search engine -- our system does a lot of work in extracting and classifying those citation statements, which makes it more powerful than traditional scientific search engines.
And besides just using our search, a huge time-saving value of our service is the report pages which helps you quickly build a qualitative understanding of how something was cited.
Even if all scientific papers were freely accessible, our report pages allow you to see the direct, relevant snippets from citing papers without having to manually read each and every single one. I think that is quite valuable!
I know I've gone on a little tangent from the original discussion about scihub, and having free and open access to papers, but I did just want to throw that in because I think it's an important distinction. And as much as we all want that free and open world to exist, I think it's also interesting to think about how we can open up that information for people in the interim.
Best,
Ashish