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.

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Extension stats

By: https://unpaywall.org

View on Chrome Web Store

Users: 800,000+

Rating: 4.02 (244)

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

Ranking

# 699 ▼ 9

Other rankings

#2934 in Workflow & Planning ▲ 3

#11 in article keyword 8 ▼ 5

#13 in free access keyword 70 ▼ 1

#22 in legal keyword 6 ▲ 1

#44 in author keyword 8 ▼ 4

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Other platforms

Unpaywall (v3.98)

4.39

(232) 68,919+

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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 Chrome Web Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate, spammy, or outdated.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 searching for open-access versions of papers
When it works, it can successfully unlock research articles
User-friendly and practical for accessing science papers

Cons

Inconsistent performance; doesn't always find papers
Often fails to work on certain sites, particularly French journals
Limited success accessing articles behind paywalls

Most mentioned

Works inconsistently
Saves time when it does work
Not effective for certain sites or journals

Recent reviews

Mim .z.y, 2024-10-22

It's a dice roll whether it finds a paper or not, but when it works it saves you time for sure. It stopped working today and I'm not sure why. Do I need to switch back to Firefox?