..and of those, I really wouldn't be giving the one under the direct control of Russia's FSB as my top recommendation.

A little-known American search engine known as Bing[1] lists Sci-Hub just fine though.

[1] https://www.bing.com/search?q=sci-hub

Of course Sci Hub was developed by a Russian, which is probably why Yandex is not censoring it. Also, I don't think the Russian government cares much for intellectual property rights of companies in NATO countries, for obvious reasons. But they are definitely censoring a wide range of other topics.

Check this reports for some details on the types of things that Yandex censors: https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/07/30/disrupted-throttled-an...

You can still Google Sci-Hub, and find plenty of pages listing active mirrors.

Notably, https://www.sci-hub.pub is the top hit for me, and is reliable enough.

A lot of "new" discoveries are rediscoveries of old things, which may have been not important at the time of their initial discovery, because in order to be useful they depended on advances in other domains, but when those advances happen, suddenly they become important and they can be the base of state-of-the-art techniques.

Therefore Sci-Hub remains very relevant, as a repository containing a very large number of historically-important research papers, including many research papers from the 19th century or early 20th century, which should have been in the public domain, but which can still be found behind paywalls elsewhere.