That seems rediculously cheap and easy to come up with funds for. Storing the entire progress of science for $1k/mo? That's a good deal.

True, a low grade ICO for SciHub, backing an multi-country IPFS store with a decent web interface on top could raise that money easily. You could create a mini forum/social network around it for commenting on papers. Buying a coin to make an account or freemium buying a 'VIP' accounts ala Dribbble...maybe even a DocumentCloud style annotation system, so it has some self-sustaining business model other than raising initial capital.

Although I don't know much about creating 'DApps' or how Ethereum or IPFS works or what SciHub contains beyond a primitive grasp [1], just sayin :p

[1] I watched a video of a talk "Distributed Apps with IPFS (Juan Benet) - Full Stack Fest 2016" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jONZtXMu03w

Why does everything have to be an ICO? What's the point of a token here? Just give the appropriate organization some charitable funds.

That's one way to look at it.

Another is 13 2TB drives at $70 a pop. May run into some network congestion sharing however :)