Unpaywall

Unpaywall

Legally get full text of scholarly articles as you browse.

What is Unpaywall?
'Unpaywall' is a handy research tool that helps users freely access full-text PDFs of scholarly articles. It scours the web for author-posted manuscripts legally hosted on university and government servers, often termed as 'Green Open Access'. Unpaywall strictly adheres to publisher permissions and excludes papers posted outside of these permissions from its index.
Stats
Users: 700,000+
Rating: 4.06 (222)
Version: 3.98 (Last updated: 2021-07-30)
Creation date: 2020-02-28
Risk impact: Low risk impact
Risk likelihood: Very low risk likelihood
Manifest version: 2
Permissions:
  • *://*.oadoi.org/*
  • storage
Size: 683.01K
URLs: Website
Stats date:

Other platforms

Unpaywall
Unpaywall (v3.98)
4.38 (218) 60,786+
Not available on Edge
Want to check extension ranking and stats more quickly for other Chrome extensions? Install Chrome-Stats extension to view Chrome-Stats data as you browse the Chrome Web Store.
Chrome-Stats extension
Summary

Get full text of scholarly articles as you browse. When you view a research article, Unpaywall automatically looks for a copy in our index of 20 million free, legal fulltext PDFs. If we find one, click the green tab to read the article.

Unpaywall points you to legal, author-posted manuscripts that are hosted on university and government web servers. We are pointing to versions that have been posted with the full and explicit authorization of the publishers themselves.

These free, author-posted manuscripts are often called "Green Open Access" and are a longstanding and completely legal part of the scholarly communications ecosystem. The majority of scholarly journals permit authors to "self-archive" their papers on university and government web servers. It's these legally self-archived papers that Unpaywall helps users find. Any papers posted outside of publisher permissions are NOT included in our index.

User reviews
User reviews summary
These summaries are automatically generated weekly using AI based on recent user reviews. Chrome Web Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate, spammy, or outdated.
Pros
  • Saves money on accessing research papers
  • Useful for students and researchers
  • Sometimes finds free versions of articles
Cons
  • Does not work on many paywalled sites
  • Often fails to find free versions of papers
  • Does not bypass news outlets' paywalls
Most mentioned
  • Doesn't work on many sites
  • Useful when it does find free articles
  • Free access to scientific journals, not mainstream media
Recent reviews
by Lazar Jovanovic Lazar Jovanovic, 2023-12-25

by Merey Abaidildin Merey Abaidildin, 2023-12-19

by glitch0101 glitch0101, 2023-12-06
View all user reviews
Safety
Risk impact

Unpaywall is relatively safe to use as it requires very minimum permissions.

Risk likelihood

Unpaywall has earned a good reputation and can be trusted.

Upgrade to see risk analysis details
Screenshots
Promo images
Unpaywall small promo image
Small promo image
Similar extensions

Here are some Chrome extensions that are similar to Unpaywall: