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Comment by tokai | Hacker News Reader

> find [research] on SciHub or Libgen

Eh what? That's definitely not allowed in most of the world. Other than that many of these are just you are allowed to pay other to do stuff for you, which is more a question of wealth than about if one dares to do it. The thing about treating fines like payment is peak clueless upper-middle-class-plus to me.

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I have worked at 2 different universities, and later a startup where reading Nature/Science papers was necessary.

Everyone, and I mean _everyone_, used SciHub to download papers. I can assure you that most of the academic world _does_ use SciHub.

You are misunderstanding. Ofc everyone does it, you'd be stupid not to. But it is most definitely not allowed, as it is illegal to download papers from there. Nobody ever gets busted, but its bull to put that on a list of things you are allowed to do.

I think you're taking the title too literally. The article is about things you can do, but that you probably didn't ever consider as options. Replace "allowed to" with "can" in the title, and you'll get closer to the real point of the article.

Better than doing this is to email the author and ask for a copy. It's their work, and they usually (maybe always?) have no financial stake in the gated access which dominates academic publishing. I've had success using this method to read papers to which I did not have access through a paid service.

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