For me, it's the latency. If I'm researching something, I want to read the papers right then so that I can build off of them to do my next round of searches, instead of waiting for stuff to (maybe) trickle in. With scihub, I can do the search-read-search cycle in a matter of minutes rather than waiting hours/days for emails to be replied to.

> I want to read the papers right then so that I can build off of them to do my next round of searches

I want to read the papers right then so I can figure out if they're actually totally irrelevant or even just garbage, and delete them and move on.

> it's the latency

Journalists are often on deadline.

On the other hand, journalists are also those who would benefit the most from some direct interaction with the authors. The vast majority of them don’t have anywhere near the background necessary to actually understand the articles.

maybe those journalists shouldn't be the ones covering the papers then

May be field dependent but unfortunately the most likely outcome is the authors never getting back to you.

Not my experience, and I do this regularly. Scientists are often happy when people are interested in their research.

Many authors I'm interested in are dead.

Asks are rarely answered.

in this case, the article does suggest asking the journal for a free account - not directly to the authors (that's #6)

I have never heard about a researcher who would not provide an article when asked, ever. Most of them would also be happy to discuss the content of the articles, how they can be replicated and whether they are still accurate.

It does have more friction and latency than a search engine, though.

What if the researcher is dead?