That's great, but it is not the universal experience (at a minimum, many past authors are now dead). And of course many scientists need to read a lot of papers.

That's great, but it is not the universal experience (at a minimum, many past authors are now dead). And of course many scientists need to read a lot of papers. Having to go through the rigmarole of emailing authors, waiting for a response, is a pointless waste of everybody's time. #icanhazpdf is valuable because it's usually very fast. Sci-Hub and libgen are even more valuable because they are even faster and allow search+discovery without waiting for a third person to act.