Wikipedia has a program for established editors (with 10+ edits the last month) to access journals through <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...</a>
Elephant in the room is missing as the author must know.<p>Sci-Hub is sparse for recent articles in certain notorious high profile journals. Authors are getting better about coughing funds to pay for open access at publication.<p>Yes, asking for reprint is still highly effective.
Re: all the mentions of Sci-Hub, I assume the organization intends to keep a professional image and avoid legal trouble, so they won't just come out and say "just pirate it". Plenty of institutions consider the use of Sci-Hub as misconduct. (I'm just presenting the stance, not defending it, if not clear.)
Sci-Hub (scientific articles)<p>Library Genesis (Nonfiction & fiction books, scientific articles, mass-market magazines)<p>Z-Library (Books, articles)<p>annas-archive (Books, articles)<p>Out-of-copyright / open-access materials can be found through the Internet Archive / Open Library, Project Gutenberg, and Standard Ebooks (latter drawing mostly from the former). Preprints can be found on preprint servers such as ArXiv and SSRN.
My personal favorite? #2: "Ask"<p>It is truly astonishing what you can get when you ask (of course, the answer could be "no", but asking is free - why not do it?)
If all you need to do is <i>read</i> an article (but not download), you can register for a free acount with jstor that allows you to read 100 articles a month:<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/register?redirectUri=%2F" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.jstor.org/register?redirectUri=%2F</a><p>I have jstor access elsewhere (through a school) which allows me to actually download pdfs, but it doesn't carry all the journals that going straight through jstor does. And often I just need a single result from a paper or the article is short, and reading online without downloading is fine.<p>arxiv.org is best if the article is recent and available there.<p>Journals published by professional societies sometimes have free access - e.g. some, but not all, of the American Mathematical Society journals. Go to the organization's web site and search the journal there.<p>If you know the author(s) of the paper and they're still active, a search on the author(s) will often turn up faculty web pages with download links. I've found that it's useful to search (ddg, google, etc.) on the author + title of the book/paper, as opposed to going to a site that aggregates works and then searching, because a given site might not have that book/paper. I've often found books, for instance, that were not on places like Project Gutenberg.
Another article with a different round-up of resources:<p>'You’re a Researcher Without a Library: What Do You Do?' - <a href="https://medium.com/a-wikipedia-librarian/youre-a-researcher-without-a-library-what-do-you-do-6811a30373cd" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://medium.com/a-wikipedia-librarian/youre-a-researcher-...</a>
My usual go-to is to use Sci-Hub but that database hasn't been updated in a long time so I've switched over to Nexus Search. Chrome and Firefox extension here: <a href="https://github.com/aokellermann/nexus-now">https://github.com/aokellermann/nexus-now</a>
Often a preprint can be found on arxiv.org, SSRN (for social science research), or searching "pdf <article title>". My local public library has obtained published papers for me on a few occasions.