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Comment by _Algernon_ | Hacker News Reader

Towards the end of writing my Master's thesis, more often than not, I would go through sci-hub to get papers, the simple reason being that even if my university had paid for access to that specific journal, I'd have to jump through hoops to get it.

5-10 minutes jumping through hoops versus 30 seconds getting it on sci-hub. Easy choice.

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Can you describe the process for getting access through your university? I'm curious what that experience is like

Either you need to log in 5o your universities bespoke portal that aggregates your providers, or you need to do some weird third party registration, and navigate a bunch of login flows on the slowest websites in eternity. Closest comparison is imagine you want to a watch a show on your laptop but you don't know if it's on netflix, prime or Disney.

Usually it is as simple as being connected through eduroam (the university wifi) or VPNing into the university network. Sometimes you have to log in to the university library portal and get it through there. Some journals want you to create accounts to access, and don't let you download, only read in the webviewer (without highlights or annotations of course).

My university would ask me to proxy my internet over their proxy servers to reach the papers legally, when I am not in the campus. It was such a painful process for non computer science students, as they would not understand how to make this work.

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