Of course, none of them are ever going to say in a million years "Yeah our researchers don't mind so much now that they can get any paper illegally. Extortion over.", but it doesn't take much reading between the lines.
Not only do universities not openly admit to SciHub usage, but there are even university administrations that still warn their students and staff against using SciHub.
I recently read through a fairly prominent European university’s freshly-revised course for undergraduates on how basic use of the library and research methods (I saw this as part of my job, so naturally I won’t name the institution). Among the course content on how to find journal articles in JSTOR and Web of Science, how to properly cite your sources, etc. were admonitions not to use SciHub because it “is illegal”, and warnings that use of SciHub can lead to failing a course or having one’s student status revoked.
SciHub is different because it replicates primary sources.
I'd argue that it's unethical to keep publicly funded science behind a paywall, so perhaps the ethical question you're implying is more nuanced than that of simple "piracy".
Reading a secondary source for an overview then diving into primary sources is a perfectly fine and ethical way to do research. I can’t see how schools and teachers advising students to read secondary sources for context but then follow their references to primary sources to read for the details would cause any kind of ethical compromise.
There is no reason to cite SciHub (just like there is no reason to cite Academia.edu, ResearchGate, some professor’s personal webpage with a hosted preprint, Google Scholar, etc.) whether or not someone uses it.
Tacit acceptance of Sci-Hub is tacit acceptance that some laws don't matter and everyone knows it. That's certainly an ethical stance with implications. It's not necessarily a bad stance (D&D would call it "chaotic good") and it is I think my own stance, but once you decide that laws are secondary to your personal and professional needs if you don't get caught, you're likely to use the same argument in other respects. Citing the original paper instead of the Sci-Hub URL only increases the extent to which you're pretending to follow the law.
Wikipedia has primary sources linked, yes, but it has its own biases. It tries not to, but it still has them to some extent, perhaps just in terms of what sections have been written and what haven't based on editors' interests. If you use Wikipedia to find primary sources, you're filtering your research through those biases. That has direct implications, and indirect implications for ethics in that you've decided this filtering is acceptable to you and also that it's acceptable (and perhaps required) not to acknowledge it. (And yes, of course there are other biases in terms of what university libraries stock, what previous academics have written about, what funding agencies are interested in, etc. I'd say that how much you pay attention to these potential biases and whether you see them as significant is also a question of ethics.)
Also, even if sci-hub were legal, you still wouldn't cite the sci-hub url. That's not how things are cited.
I don't think it's that clear cut. If you drive above the speed limit, or smoke weed in a state where it's not allowed, or pirate some DVDs, you're not automatically going to progress to more serious crimes. People seem to be perfectly capable of "ahh let's ignore this stupid law" and not start sliding down some slippery slope.
I think it's more nuanced than this. Something being illegal and immoral, are two different things (there's overlap, but not always). Some laws are completely wrong and breaking them is not immoral. IMO (you may disagree) academic articles "belonging" to the publishers and being copyrighted, is one of them. Hence, I'd rephrase what you wrote above as: "but once you decide that laws are secondary to your [...] needs [...], if they're terrible laws that should be changed, (but probably won't be, at least in the near future, due to inertia and lobbying), you're likely to use the same argument in other respects", which is much less problematic and in some ways a good thing.
Obviously, motivated reasoning is an issue, so you should be very careful not to fall into that trap and start breaking laws willy-nilly arguing that they're all bad laws.
> Citing the original paper instead of the Sci-Hub URL only increases the extent to which you're pretending to follow the law.
How is it at all relevant how I got a paper? Once upon a time, there were paper copies of journals in libraries. If you were citing a paper at that time, you wouldn't write "Journal of X, found on the 3rd shelf, in the 5th aisle of the Y library". In current times, you can (usually) legally get a paper by pestering the original author for a copy, by e-mail. If you do, you wouldn't cite the paper as "obtained from Original Researches, mailto:zzz"). (If you put a "link" in the citation, it should be the DOI (digital object identifier) as it's the universal(-ish), immutable (hopefully) identifier.)
Is therefore interesting that a big university makes this move, with the argument: "the publisher would have charged UC authors large publishing fees on top of the university’s multi-million dollar subscription"
Part of why SciHub has succeeded is just how easy it is. Copy/pasting an arbitrary DOI from any source will always beat most journals arcane login systems (especially on mobile) and their divine mission of obscuring "Download PDF" buttons.
Also, inter-library loan is a source of income for the university library, that is, if the library does not have access to a particular journal in the databases it subscribes to, then it will obtain the journal article from elsewhere but at a hefty fee, so perhaps this is another reason they would prefer students avoid SciHub.
Not doing an exhaustive search of academic literature because it is prohibitively expensive or time-consuming is a clear negative -- doing so may result in lower-quality research.
I personally see many good reasons to distinguish general intellectual property theft from using SciHub for academic research.
By your logic it might become moral to murder, because it benefits you and maybe many others more than the one murdered.
Following the law is always a moral obligation and personally deciding which rules should be followed and which shouldn't is a dangerous space. Especially from a biased and self-centered world view, which we all have as individuals.
You do. And I do. You define it for you, and I define it for me. You and I are both going to define murder as immoral, and not commit murder. Should one of us define it otherwise, the other will in practice likely be powerless to prevent the outcome.
This is the way the world works. At the end of the day, there is no universal ruleset that all humans will follow like automata; we each get to make our own path. The best we can do is attempt to persuade others to change their moral framework and to gang up with people who agree with us to create systems that inhibit those who disagree with us.
There is no sense moaning about this state of affairs because this is the way it's always been and the way it always will be.
> "By your logic it might become moral to murder"
Something else to keep in mind, is that morality is likely rooted in some limited extent in biology. The basis for this assertion is that across time and cultures, one form or another of law against murder has always been popular in any human civilization you can find evidence for. Even when societies carved out formal exceptions to this rule, such as the legal witch burnings in recent European history, the human sacrifices in more ancient European history, or the human sacrifices seen in Aztec civilization (that had no plausible meaningful cultural exchange with Eurasia for many thousands of years), there still exist laws in some form against murder in general. My point with this likely controversial digression is that it's unlikely that anybody who constructs an argument for the morality of academic copyright infringement will accidentally construct a persuasive argument for casual murder. Even if you use formal logic to find a link between their perspective on copyright to casual murder, that formal argument will be irrationally rejected by nearly everybody, who has an innate predisposition towards rejecting a system of legal casual murder.
tl;dr: reductio ad fortuita occidendum is not a persuasive argument.
law 1. (archaic) An agreed rule that everyone must obey. 2. A document produced by the government that grants additional powers to the police to confiscate property and otherwise punish people and to protect the police in case some troublemaker complains to a court.
lawful Of or pertaining to an act of killing committed by the government, the police, or the armed forces.
Which statement is true...
"By locking knowledge behind pathways you are both directly and indirectly causes the death of others by limiting information to people that could use it to save others"
"By not respecting copyright you are breaking the institutions that create scientific knowledge and making it riskier for said institutions to invest and create new things which can be used to save others"
The law is always at moral odds with itself. It must try to achieve both goals which is an impossibility.
> "I fully support our faculty, staff and students in breaking down paywalls that hinder the sharing of groundbreaking research" ...