[ImaCake]

This post and the four (4) comments suggesting alternate methods to do this are a pretty good indicator that pirating papers is still by far the easier method than going through official channels.

I think it would be marginally quicker for me to access a paper legally if I was on my uni's campus. But I am WFH from the other side of the country and would need to log into the VPN. Sci-hub with one of these solutions would be much quicker!

[simsla]

There's also cost.

My company gives me access to a few journals, but at home I have no such thing. $20 is ridiculous for a paper, given that (a) the authors rarely see anything of this money, and (b) you often need to skim 10 papers before you find the 1 that's relevant.

Luckily, many papers in my research domain (compsci/ML) are open access. 90% is either on arxiv or Google Scholar knows a pdf URL.

For the rest, scihub is a lifesaver.

[PeterisP]

> the authors rarely see anything of this money

IMHO it's not rarely but never, I'm not aware of any plausible scenario where any author would ever get a single cent of that payment.

[sampo]

> the authors rarely see anything of this money

The authors never see anything of that money. Scientific journals do not pay for the authors of the published research papers.

[epgui]

Indeed, and even worse: authors pay scientific journals thousands of dollars in publishing fees per article.

You want your article to be open access? No problem, that'll be thousands more dollars.