SciHub is a web service that downloads papers on demand. In addition to serving the paper up, they also send a backup to LibGen, making LibGen's scientific paper section an archive of SciHub.

Implementation detail I gloss over for the audience.

Would you call Netflix a rich client for s3 though?

I think there is value in the destinction if it's only used as a storage backend, but actually gets the media through different sources.

No, I'd call Netflix a rich client for Netflix's OpenConnect appliance network.

To be clear, I have a deep appreciation for SciHub and LibGen, I just don't have the energy to dive in depth in this forum.

I thought the openconnect network was basically just a cache which tries to serve popular media directly from the providers?

They didn't have enough storage for their full library on the appliances previously. So that'd be like a caching proxy in front of the service

Maybe that changed with how tiny their library became over the years. (Edit:it didn't change. That's what it is.)