Elephant in the room is missing as the author must know.
Sci-Hub is sparse for recent articles in certain notorious high profile journals. Authors are getting better about coughing funds to pay for open access at publication.
Yes, asking for reprint is still highly effective.
Also, annas-archive. Has Literally millions of science articles (including the ones from Sci-Hub) all preserved on there along with books. Definitely better then Google Scholar imo.
It’s not at all in the same niche as Google Scholar. GS is a search engine to legitimate sources for scientific articles. It’s about finding where the articles are, not about getting the articles themselves.
Sci-Hub is sparse for recent articles in certain notorious high profile journals. Authors are getting better about coughing funds to pay for open access at publication.
Yes, asking for reprint is still highly effective.