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Sci-hub has become significantly less useful because all new uploads are paused pending resolution of a court case in India. That includes anything published in the last year. A large portion of a working academic's reading load will be keeping up with recently published literature.

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But for papers published recently you can email an author and they will send you a PDF.

Just imagine how useful search engines would be if you had to email someone every time you wanted to click a link. Just keeping up with the literature is typically a dozen or more papers a week, plus skimming dozens to hundreds more if you're actively doing research. That's a lot of email and it's a lot of unnecessary burden for the very nice people who reply.

Piracy and open access are the only scalable alternatives to institutional access.

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