Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to take away from Sci-Hub, but even without institutional access, there are often alternatives: - more and more research institutes have a public repository of articles. - plenty of authors put their own (preprints of) papers on their personal website, a preprint server like arxiv, or researchgate. - lastly, you can mail an author and request a preprint. Not all will reply, but plenty will be happy that someone n…
Those take effort and time (hours or days) to make them work. Sci-Hub type solutions are the only way to make this work at scale.
For a single paper, googling for the pdf, failing that, searching for author page / institutional repo doesn't take much effort. A few minutes, I'd guess.
That still becomes prohibitive for >10 papers sought. Then you need institutional access, something like Sci-Hub, or a lot of patience.
Mailing works as a last resort option.
Honestly, part of the reason i jump through such hoops is to justify not including a paper. I have institutional access and all these options. If none of that suffices, I feel justified in considering the alleged article as not part of the scientific record.