Probably some negative impact. Sci-hub is the primary and in some case only way to access paywalled papers at master and undergrad level. I’m not sure how PhD students get access to them but if it through libraries this is bad for them as the opening days and hours of such institutions is limited. Even more so which strikes which sometimes close a library for weeks.
You can typically get any paper your university library has a subscription to via the libraries online portal or if you are in the university network already at the undergraduate and masters level. If some journal is not available at the library you can request an interlibrary „loan“ which just means that someone at another library will copy the article and send it to you, typically for free.
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.
As an researcher I typically only encounter a paywall when I‘m not logged into my institutes VPN. In the rare cases I want to read something the university is not subscribed to, Scihub is indeed a good solution. Open access just moves the cost of publishing to research groups and disincentives proper peer review, because the journal’s revernue is tied to how many paper it publishes. See for example the 15+ Frontiers in ... Journals, which are just barely not predatory and basically publish anything with a pulse. A mix of preprint severs like arxiv and (much later) journal publication seem like a good compromise.
Journals don't incentivize proper peer review, open access or otherwise. Peer review is just something that professors and their assistants are expected to do as part of their research. Which means it's usually paid for by the public, ultimately.
