Don’t Even Think About Using These Incredibly Useful Websites!

An actual photo of a student accessing a single page pdf for their upcoming essay, so horrible

By Ruairidh Macdonald

"Anonymous Hacker" by dustball is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

In the age of the internet, the student experience has simultaneously become more accessible and more difficult. Exposure to millions of documents and other pieces of information has made researching and studying for your degree so much easier compared to years prior. However, some of this access has come at a cost, specifically pay walls and subscriptions necessary to read anymore than a paragraph or abstract and good for them!

During these “unprecedented times”, the companies responsible for editing and publishing this information have been hit harder than ever, especially with a majority of their operations including operating a database website. So now, it needs to be said how important it is to have to fork out more than a three-course meal for a family of four to gain, sometimes temporary, access to a five-page pdf file that may or may not even be relevant to what you are researching at all. It’s a shame that people are more concerned with the students rather than corporations at times like these.

Of course, I have not yet introduced the worst evil known to society. There are these websites available to access at any time, that give you unparalleled access to millions of research papers and books meanwhile bypassing the various paywalls set up to protect this information. It’s actually disgusting. Websites like Sci-Hub and Z-Library have little to no regard for basic human decency and should have been shut down years ago but are somehow still accessible, corrupting the youth and depriving these large multi-national publishing firms of all the revenue that they worked so hard for.

Ultimately, avoid these websites like the plague as they will have no use in the pursuit of your studies and always make sure that you have the ability to take out a small loan before you decide to purchase one of these research papers or books, it will definitely help.