Unpaywall
Legally get full text of scholarly articles as you browse.
What is Unpaywall?
Stats
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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
- 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
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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