It is the photo of a person with long dark hair, colourful shirt, and wearing a pirate hat. To their left, the logo of Sci-hub. To their right, that of The Pirate Bay. Over the image float several sentences in white with black border:
knowledge belongs to humanity THEY DON’T EVEN PAY THE PEER REVIEWERS piracy of academic material is morally good and justified your taxes fund this research be gay do crime it’s your to take if you want
As a researcher I always make sure that there is at least a preprint available for download, and always try to publish my research in open access journals (which is much more expensive).
I will be glad if someone pirate my papers, it is a corrupt system in many ways.
This is the way.
In some areas of theory, all the cool stuff happens on https://arxiv.org/ months before they end up being officially published and "paywalled".
And in my area (theoretical computer science) we mostly publish short versions in conferences and put the full versions with proofs on arxiv. Of course everyone is downloading and using the latter. The rest is just for the "metrics".