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There is an answer to a question that I am hiding as a comment in the source below that very clearly and explicitly links to Sci-Hub in order to provide a PDF for a paid article.

Without bringing up anyone's personal opinions, what is Chemistry.SE's policy for linking against paywall-bypassing services? This applies primarily to questions and answers, not comments (because they are not meant to be permanent) or chat (because it is not meant to be an official record).

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  • $\begingroup$ I think I just went there and removed said link :D And so I did. Side note: chat is saved forever unless rooms are ‘not worth keeping’ (less than three users and less than twenty or so messages between them). $\endgroup$
    – Jan
    Mar 18, 2017 at 0:19
  • $\begingroup$ Also, I don’t see why you would want to single out sci-hub separately; they’re probably not the only mirror to bypass paywalls out there. (And any policy should apply to all such sites not only to one.) $\endgroup$
    – Jan
    Mar 18, 2017 at 0:24
  • $\begingroup$ 2. Sci-Hub is the most visible paywall bypass, but I suppose this question can be made more general so I will edit it. $\endgroup$
    – pentavalentcarbon
    Mar 18, 2017 at 0:37
  • $\begingroup$ 1. I know that chat is permanent (I have gone back and read some of the earliest logs before), but it is not meant to serve as an official "scientific record" in the same way that Q&A is. $\endgroup$
    – pentavalentcarbon
    Mar 18, 2017 at 0:38
  • $\begingroup$ @Jan 'deleted' chats, like 'deleted' posts, are still there, just not accessible to the public. It is extremely rare on SE that something is gone forever. $\endgroup$
    – Martin - マーチン Mod
    Mar 18, 2017 at 1:16

1 Answer 1

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Circumventing pay-walls is illegal. As much as I'm for open and transparent science accessible for everyone, I think our policy should be to not allow this.

There are, depending on the journal, legal ways to publish preprints, etc., where it is okay to link to these. As always, the answer should include a human readable citation, so that you can look up the article yourself, with the means your conscience is okay with. As a community, however, we should not encourage illegal behaviour.

As a user I believe I flagged for such links, and as a moderator I have removed such links. I don't think that should change.
Questionable sources should be removed.

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