> You can often email a researcher and they will sometimes send a pre-print version of the article if you don't have access. Most of us would send the final pu

> You can often email a researcher and they will sometimes send a pre-print version of the article if you don't have access. Most of us would send the final published version with proper formatting. It’s not even subversive, it’s something included in the non-commercial uses of the license agreements. Here’s Elsevier, but the others are similar: https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/copyright . TL;DR: sending pdfs is perfectly ok; what they don’t want is uploading them to servers (which is perfectly ok morally but not so legally (yet)).