Today I quickly put together this tool that has been doing pretty well: find a working Sci-Hub domain.
Tip: http://whereisscihub.now.sh/go immediately redirects you to a working domain.
@Flockademic hm, thanks! I've been wanting to visit it to examine it from a UX POV for my own work -- figure out what's useful about the site design besides easy/free PDFs (ugh I wish we could get this done with our vended stuff)
@platypus Haha, I think its main selling point is still the free PDFs :P
(Or in fact, the bad UX of the traditional channels, which makes almost any experience look good in comparison.)
@platypus I feel your pain. I'm afraid it's that 80% that would need to be solved, which isn't really in your hands. Any experience that involves "find article, immediately access" is always going to be superior to any other, so unless you can do ILL instantly and without the user noticing it is happening, preferably all from the same interface, you're not going to be able to beat Sci-Hub.
That said, Sci-Hub doesn't do discovery, so that'd be an area where you could have an edge.
@Flockademic right? Like ... I want to get people to the "free to them" PDFs... like sure, it's not for everyone but I'm at Penn State and people here should be able to get to maybe 75% of all journal everythings free and put in ILL requests for the other 25%. So how do I make that as easy as possible
(w/o commiting to Highlander combat w/publishers & vendors... which is 80% of the problme)