You could try Sci-Hub and LibGen. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can always email the authors or other scholars who may have access to the paper you’re interested in. A less alternative site would be arXiv, but it just has preprints.

.local is reserved for mDNS, that’s why I don’t use it. Since it’s reserved, Firefox “knows” that if you type something.local it shouldn’t search the web.

I’m using Fedora, I know I can edit my hosts file to point to a domain, but I don’t want to do that. I map the domains with a pihole instance, and I’d like to keep the record of domains centralized. Also, editing the hosts file won’t solve the issue with Firefox not pointing to the site.