14 Websites to Download Research Paper for Free - 2023 - iLovePhD (2024)

FAQs

Is Sci-Hub illegal? ›

Sci-Hub (SciHub) is a searchable database of articles and papers that have been made illegally available. Content that is available through this platform is infringing the copyright of many scholarly publishers.

Sci-Hub, a shadow library that offers a free gateway to paywalled academic research, has lost control over one of its main domain names. Sci-Hub.se was deactivated by The Internet Foundation in Sweden, which manages the country's . se domains.

Alternative 1 – Booksc.org

Booksc is a website that has more than 50 million articles. It has been assumed that the website has collected these articles from the IP addresses that Sci-Hub used for the same purpose. The search feature of the website is easy to use.

Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Sci-Hub sites are already blocked in several countries, including the UK, Austria and France. In March 2021, the City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) issued a warning to students and universities not to use Sci-Hub.

SciHub is a website that provides free access to millions of academic papers and research articles that are normally behind paywalls. The website was launched in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakhstan-based neuroscientist who was frustrated with the high cost of accessing academic research.

http://sci-hub.tw.

How DOI use Sci-Hub? ›

Here's how it works:If you go to the current location of Sci-Hub (it's a Google search away) and input a DOI or article url Sci-Hub will set you a captcha to complete [there's something about that that almost makes me smile]. It then searches LibGen to see if it can find an existing copy of the item in question.

Go to the ScienceDirect Download portal. Copy the article URL or paper address and paste it into the Science direct download column. Click on the “Key” logo to route for the article and generate a download link. Click on the “Downloader” button to download and save a copy to your device storage.

A DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, is a string of numbers, letters and symbols used to uniquely identify an article or document, and to provide it with a permanent web address (URL). A DOI will help your reader easily locate a document from your citation.

It was the largest copyright infringement case that had been filed in the U.S., or in the world, at the time. Elsevier alleged that Sci-Hub violated copyright law and induced others to do so, and it alleged violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as inducements to violate that law.

se's top 5 competitors in May 2023 are: researchgate.net, mdpi.com, semanticscholar.org, libgen.is, and more.

Sci-Hub, an illegal website that provides pirated copies of copyrighted scientific articles, obtains the articles by accessing a university or institution's network while using the credentials of registered users and then downloading mass volumes of articles in a short period of time.

Apart from all the above plus points, Sci-Hub does have some disadvantages as follows. Article usage information is lost. One cannot directly track how many times the article was accessed or downloaded. Journals do have some expenses to publish an article, but in a way, Sci-Hub is not justifying them.

To protect yourself when you go to Sci Hub, use a VPN like the one I presented to you that will allow you to send and receive data in complete confidentiality. You will be anonymous and untraceable.

SCOPUS focuses on independent journals in the research field of Science, Technology, Medicine, and Social Sciences, however, SCIE indexing focuses on technical and scientific publications including natural and social sciences.

Researchers can find research articles and more using specialized search engines like Google Scholar, which is an excellent resource for accessing research articles. Other options include Microsoft Academic, Pubmed Central, Science.gov., Worldcat, and Refseek, to name a few¹.

What website gives access to journal articles for free? ›

Unpaywall: An open database of 20 million free scholarly articles. An open database of 47,491,763 free scholarly articles. We harvest Open Access content from over 50,000 publishers and repositories, and make it easy to find, track, and use.

All Springer Nature book authors, book editors and chapter authors are entitled to receive a free copy of their own e-book. Shortly after your book's publication, you will receive an email with a link that allows you to download your personal free copy of your e-book (PDF file).

While Google searches the entire Web, Google Scholar limits its searches to only academic journal articles produced by commercial publishers or scholarly societies. Google Scholar eliminates material from corporations, non-scholarly organizations, and from individuals.

Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub to thwart journal paywalls. Beyond being the founder of Sci-Hub, the world's largest pirate site for academic papers, and risking arrest as a result, Alexandra Elbakyan is a typical science graduate student: idealistic, hard-working, and relatively poor.

“Students should be aware that accessing such websites is illegal, as it hosts stolen intellectual property,” a spokesperson said.

SciHub was founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011 in Kazakhstan in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. In 2015, academic publisher Elsevier filed a legal complaint against SciHub alleging copyright infringement, and the subsequent lawsuit led to a loss of the original scihub.org domain.

Why is Sci-Hub controversial? ›

It was the largest copyright infringement case that had been filed in the U.S., or in the world, at the time. Elsevier alleged that Sci-Hub violated copyright law and induced others to do so, and it alleged violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as inducements to violate that law.

The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria, Britain, and France. I'm deeply ashamed that my country would block sci-hub given that the current system is preventing scientific development. Scientists should put Scihub in the acknowledgements section of their papers.

To truly sit within the science fiction genre, you have to have some element of realism with your science. Otherwise, it is simply fantasy (which is okay and I have no problem with this, but at least be honest with yourself). Real science fiction takes what we know about science and then adds the story on top.

se's top 5 competitors in May 2023 are: researchgate.net, mdpi.com, semanticscholar.org, libgen.is, and more.

Sci-Hub, an illegal website that provides pirated copies of copyrighted scientific articles, obtains the articles by accessing a university or institution's network while using the credentials of registered users and then downloading mass volumes of articles in a short period of time.

According to publishers, it's technically illegal to use a service such as SciHub. As Cashman points out, viewing the content from SciHub is considered a "grey area" in Germany and in many other countries.

Russia-based Sci-Hub describes itself as "the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers", and is run in support of the Open Access movement, responding to the increasingly large fees charged by publishers.

In other words you are correct and your student is wrong: Sci-Hub is illegal. As for consequences, as in the linked article, if you are doing analysis of the papers themselves, then you're stuck because you can't publish data which you obtained illegally. Beyond that there's likely to be no consequences.