[lalaland1125]

One interesting thing about sci-hub is that it's actually in a researcher's best interests to have their articles uploaded to sci-hub and widely distributed. The more people that have access to an article, the more people can build off the ideas contained within, resulting in potentially more citations and advances that the original author can take advantage of.

So, you reading articles off of scihub and expanding on the contained work within directly benefits the author. Just make sure to cite the author if you yourself publish! (Which is actually much less difficult than you might think. Even a blog post can contribute to the field).

[Vinnl]

Authors are often allowed to share at least their preprints (i.e. submitted manuscripts that have not been peer reviewed yet) elsewhere, but this rarely happens in many academic disciplines. In fact, they are often required to do so by their institution, to deposit their work in its Institutional Repository, yet even that requirement is often flaunted.

(In my view, this is because the personal benefit is not that clear yet, especially if the work is just hidden in some long list of other research. Which is why I'm working on helping them use their research to raise their academic profile: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-holy-grail-in-open-access... )

[upvotinglurker]

Yup. Depositing in an institutional repository usually takes effort by the faculty member. SciHub bots will put it in SciHub for you!

[fwgwgwgch]

I like your point. It's something I've heard the first time