Study: Over 50% of academics admit to pirating research papers

"More than 50% of academics have used piracy websites like Sci-Hub in order to bypass paywalls for research they want to access, according to a recent study published in arXiv, a preprint server owned by Cornell University. The researchers surveyed more than 3,300 academics to examine why and how they use scholarly piracy websites....

One academic, who spoke to Fast Company on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from their employer, highlighted their own example of using a piracy website. “A depressing use of SciHub is for accessing an article, which I wrote, but in a journal which my current institution doesn’t currently pay for,” they say...."