Unpaywall

Legally get full text of scholarly articles as you browse.

Unpaywall - Access Scholarly Articles for Free

'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.

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Extension stats

By: https://unpaywall.org

Users: 700,000+

Rating: 4.04

(250)

Version: 3.99 (Last updated: 2025-01-08)

Creation date: 2020-02-28

Risk impact: Low risk impact

Risk likelihood:

Very low risk likelihood

Manifest version: 3

Permissions:

storage

Host permissions:

*://*.oadoi.org/*

Size: 686.08K

Email: ex*****@unpaywall.org

URLs: Website ,Privacy policy

Ranking

# 691 ▲ 26

Other rankings

#2924 in Workflow & Planning ▲ 1

#14 in article keyword 46

#18 in free access keyword 44

#27 in legal keyword 26 ▼ 1

#41 in author keyword 34

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Other platforms

Not available on Android

Unpaywall (v3.98)

4.39

(236) 70,393+

Not available on Edge

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Extension summary

Analyze keywords

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

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 Chrome Web Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate, spammy, or outdated.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 time in finding open-access research papers
Works legally and efficiently
Helps access locked research articles for free
Incredibly handy for researchers

Cons

Inconsistent success rate in finding papers
Stopped working for some users recently
Not compatible with certain websites
Some users report it doesn't work in specific languages or regions

Most mentioned

It stops working due to Chrome's manifest v3
Alternatives like Spaywall are suggested
Helps find legal workarounds for paywalled content
Users experience a mixed success rate in access

User reviews

Sally Ann, 2025-01-11

Love this extension, but it will stop working soon with the v3 manifest. When it does, you can use the "Spaywall" extension which does the same thing, and works with v3. It's free to use for research papers.