Sci-hub is sometimes the last resort to obtain a resource that is otherwise unobtainable. But what has become of the old way of obtaining unaccessible papers: Ask the authors for a copy?
Sites like ResearchGate make this very easy. And often a simple email does the job, too.
Advantages:
* It is legal
* The author gets feedback that someone out there reads their research
* Making direct contact to your peers is a good thing.
It's too time consuming and has an undefined likelihood of success. People will naturally flock to alternative methods, such as sci-hub, that are faster and until recently were near guaranteed to have the desired content.
Agreed, sci-hub is so much more convenient. But when the publishers finally shut it down for good, we'll have to find another solution.
A community of scientists sharing their papers would be a good thing already now.
I personally know active scientists who don't even try anymore to look up the paper, but rather go directly to sci-hub for any doi they need. I can understand why, but I also think that this doesn't lead to a sustainable publishing culture.
But honestly, how often does one have to skim that many papers in a day, to a level where the freely available abstract is not sufficient?
Perhaps every once in a while when one compiles a survey of a new field they enter. Once the project is set on the rails, one rarely has to read that much.
> how often does one have to skim that many papers in a day, to a level where the freely available abstract is not sufficient?
More often than you might think.
To take an example from my own work, I was doing assay design a while back, and needed to collect all existing primer sets in the literature. I probably went through a hundred papers over a several day period.
Sites like ResearchGate make this very easy. And often a simple email does the job, too.
Advantages:
* It is legal
* The author gets feedback that someone out there reads their research
* Making direct contact to your peers is a good thing.