Why Sci-Hub is illegal, and what you can do about it | engineuring

"Sci-Hub is oftenly presented as an illegal way to get access to paywalled research papers, and hence, in some way inferior to the other options, like:

– send an email to the authors of the manuscript and ask them to send you a copy;

– search Google Scholar, perhaps the paper is available somewhere; etc. Indeed, Sci-Hub emerged in 2011 to surpass these ‘legal’ methods. Researchers were doing these for years and decades, even before email was invented: asking authors and other researchers to send them a copy of the paper."