You could try Sci-Hub and LibGen. If you don't find what you're looking for, you can always email the authors or other scholars who may have access to the paper you're interested in. A less alternative site would be arXiv, but it just has preprints.
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Emailing the author has quite a good succes rate. Many just forced to use a publisher to get it out but love giving their paper to those who are interested.
Atleast that's my experience in trying to get certain papers for my studies.
sometimes paper is also available at researchgate
sci-hub.se will get you most of papers
libgen.rs will get you most of books
I've heard you can just email one of the authors of the paper, if you're looking for a specific one.
Specifically, the corresponding author (which should have their email listed in the publication)
Keep in mind you may get an "uncorrected proof" or "author copy" since many authors don't want to run afoul of their publisher's guidelines on giving out copies
Scihub for most things. You can also sometimes find preprints (or contact the authors) on RG.
Sci-hub almost has everything, but you can access the rest by using a University account that pays for access
Unfortunately I'm not in University. Just reading them for personal learning. Thanks for the suggestion though!
Depending on your country, a local public library may also have access to these databases
Yep, some pages even recognise you're connecting from the library's IP address (using your own device) and will immediately let you in
To add on to that, a librarian could possibly help get you an article if your library doesn’t have access to it through interlibrary loan
sci-hub has already been mentioned, but I will say that though it is not piracy, depending on the field, you can find free version "pre-prints" of papers on arxiv.org and socarxiv.org
arxiv has a narrow scope, there's also biorxiv.org but both are for preprints which is a little bit different thing
Many publications on arxiv (or biorxiv or medrxiv, etc) are early drafts, or otherwise not scientifically rigorous and wouldn't be published in an actual journal due to failing peer review. Take what you find there with a grain of salt.
Although you should also take any single peer-reviewed article with a grain of salt as well.
Anna's archive has a lot of scientific papers.
A lot of research can be downloaded if it's open access. If it is not, you can request papers to the authors, this is really easy in platforms like ResearchGate. Others have also mentioned SciHub if you are okay with the arrr option.
you might want to Google "Alexandra Elbakyan", for research of course 👀