I have been registered as a student in 5 French universities and I can tell you that even if I can get "any" paper if I can enter a library (which is a joke in itself), sci-hub is 10 times more convient than the bureaucracy involved. The only time I requested a book from the stock, the librarian didn't even give it to me pretexting it was lost... probably because did like me as I had an unopened sandwich in hand.
Well as I said at least in Germany the universities have a web portal through which you can access pretty much any article you want electronically. The workflow for a student of medicine is something like:
- Search for an article on PubMed in the university library portal
- Get a list of results
- Download the article as pdf from the publishers website
Additionally many journals are accessible just by navigating to the publishers website (science, nature, physics journals, ieee journals) depending on which university vpn you are logged into. This covers most use cases, I am sorry to hear it’s not the same in France.
