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Comment by ta988 | Hacker News Reader

Traffic from US has always been huge anyway on scihub so thats going to be hard...

Put you in the shoes of a grad student.

What would you choose (ethics aside) navigate to the website of your library do 20 clicks through a shitty interface to finally get a paper, and thats if you are lucky, or just paste a DOI and wait 5 seconds...

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When on mobile/iPad, my university (Harvard) makes me two-factor for every paper.

Luckily nearly every university offers their library proxy as a bookmarklet. It's two clicks: 1 to hit the bookmarklet, another to hit login on my autofilled secure sign on page.

Thankfully some universities have a decently working ezproxy config but still. Then you hit the paywall, or the non working website from the crappy publisher that thinks people want to read pdfs as their enhanced-pdf and require two other clicks to get a real pdf, during that time the 5 (not kidding look at what those pages load!) trackers are loading...

In my experience at least those are edge cases from some super dodgey journals. All the major publishers and journals worth reading work fine.

I'm talking about a major publisher here, Wiley $1.7bn revenue...

My university does (a top national one) and it’s still less reliable and UX friendly than SciHub.

What's a DOI?

Digital Object Identifier. It's a permanent URL to avoid link rot, really useful for scientific articles.

https://library.uic.edu/help/article/1966/what-is-a-doi-and-...

Said behavior is not limited to grad students.

You're right I started with grad students as an example and after rewriting I lost that effect.

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