zlacker

Before Sci-Hub, I had to find those among my friends with the right access credentials to the right publishers and ask them to get the articles on my behalf, often in batches to not make too much an annoyance of myself.

Needless to say Sci-Hub has been a massive improvement to my quality of life, insofar as satiating my intellectual curiosity is needed. And I'm not even a researcher.

>>Bayart+(OP)
Two great uses of sci-hub are for historic papers when walking the reference chain backwards in time and anything IEEE.

I really wish IEEE and ACM would open their entire catalog of knowledge over a certain age, I don't really care what year they pick.

>>sitkac+v4
IEEE journals, and especially their standards, do actually provide a value added service that government funding doesn’t cover and they obviously run as part of a non profit so it seems very morally ambiguous. I imagine likewise for ACM.

>>Bayart+(OP)
I am a researcher, and despite having institutional access to most papers I want, I still rely heavily on Sci-Hub as do my colleagues. It has been such an incredibly valuable resource and I'm constantly surprised by how complete it is -- I very rarely come across a paper I need access to that it doesn't have.

I do wonder sometimes if it almost makes it too easy, in a way that ends up propping up the status quo of closed publishing and takes away the incentive of publishing in open access sources. Early in my career I remember discussions about publishing in closed journals, concerns that papers will be less read because people may not have access to them. In the last few years, I feel like this has gone away because it seems like everyone (among researchers at least) knows about Sci-Hub.

I mean, I still think that on the whole, Sci-Hub is a good thing for the research community and the state of the publishing industry -- it gives people access to the research and ultimately does take some money out of the publishers' pockets. But it does also make a broken system feel less broken, and thus people are less willing to actively push for change.

>>Bayart+(OP)
You might know this already, but you can also just ask the authors, and they'll often send it to you. Definitely not as convenient as Sci-Hub, however.

>>biophy+Lj
I'd definitely think about doing exactly that if I were after a new paper but most of the stuff I'm interested in is in history, law history, linguistics and diplomatic. Those papers often precede the Internet, not even mentioning dead authors.

>>gms777+Ui
I think there is some nuance even for those with institutional access (e.g. field, institution, etc). I am also a researcher (though I hesitate to call myself that), and I read (or skim) through quite a few papers every week, and I very rarely run into a situation where I do not have access through the publisher. It's so uncommon that I very rarely think about (my own) access at all...

I only say this to provide my day-to-day experience, I do think Sci-Hub is a net positive, and I'm certainly in favor of seeing the status quo change.

>>Michae+yb
I think the work of the standards bodies needs to be disambiguated from Open Access journals. In no way am equating IEEE and ACM with Springer and Elsevier. For the longest time, I think they have recently relaxed a bit, but IEEE forbid authors from posting a copy of their paper on their academic web page.