Unpaywall
Legally get full text of scholarly articles as you browse.
What is Unpaywall?
Stats
- *://*.oadoi.org/*
- storage
Chrome-Stats Rank
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
Pros
- Helps find free versions of research papers/journals
- Saves time searching for legal, open-access versions
- Works well for scientific journals
Cons
- Does not work for mainstream media paywalls
- Occasionally fails to detect available full versions of articles
Most mentioned
- Doesn't work on certain websites (e.g. WSJ)
- Useful for students/researchers
- Doesn't always find free versions of papers/journals
Recent 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.
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