So I’m a new teacher (college level) as I’m still finishing up my PhD. The first class I taught I asked my supervisor if I could tell students about sci-hub. Which is a website that lets you bypass pay walls for research publications.

It’s very easy to use.

Anywho. I was told no. That I needed to tell students to use the university research portal (which is tedious does not always even grant access to the paper you want).

So what I did was I had a PowerPoint about how they shouldn’t use scihub. Which uses the doi to pull up any paper behind a pay wall. And that the link to the main sci hub site was this, because magnet links came and went frequently. But they shouldn’t use it because the university has a research paper portal that is incredibly tedious to use but the university pays a lot of money for it.

I did give links to resources for the university portal.

I also clarified that it’s not illegal to use scihub. But it’s illegal for sci hub creators to have made it. A nice little loop hole. .it’s only illegal to distribute. Not illegal to be the person it’s distributed to. But that they definitely shouldn’t use it and to use the university site instead. Definitely don’t tell their fellow students about it or share the links. And I made very obvious expressions so they got it.

Few chuckles and my work was done.