How to "Borrow" Research from the Internet

If only someone had told me about all the ways to "borrow" research materials earlier. I hope this post helps high schoolers, small schools, colleges without fancy libraries etc. I barely even use UK library resources anymore because one of these methods usually works.

1. Library Genesis Project (http://libgen.io/)
Or can be found at: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/
This is a very strong database for "borrowing" books

2. Sci-Hub ( http://sci-hub.tw/ )
This is for articles. The best way to search it is with the DOI number. So for instances this article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10736700.2018.1430552?src=recsys&journalCode=rnpr20

You can see the following below the title: 

• https://doi.org/10.1080/10736700.2018.1430552

Just pop the numbers "10.1080/10736700.2018.1430552" into sci-hub and see what happens.

Spoiler: it lets you "borrow" the article for free instantaneously 

3. BookSC (http://booksc.org/)
Little bit worse than Sci-Hub, but same basic premise.

4. Ebook Farm ( https://ebook.farm/)
This is one of the biggest collections of books to "borrow" from, but it isn't free. You have to feed it bitcoins or amazon gift cards to download books, but it is dirt cheap and will have most of what you want. The average book will be between $0.20 and $1.00

sometimes the formats for all of these are weird which you can fix here - https://www.online-convert.com/
or if it's secured go here - https://smallpdf.com/unlock-pdf

5. .acsm files or any encrpyted PDF.
When you borrow from a library (not to be confused with "borrowing") the download format is some sort of encrypted business. If you want a file you can save and store you need this https://epubee.com/epub-drm-removal-program.htm to make a permanent PDF.

Sometimes the decrypted file will not have highlight-able text in it. You need to OCR it. The gold standard is this: https://www.abbyy.com/en-us/finereader/. A worse version is this: https://www.onlineocr.net/

Happy "borrowing." If there is a method I missed let me know. 

​