Unpaywall

Unpaywall

Legally get full text of scholarly articles as you browse.

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What is Unpaywall?

Unpaywall is a popular Chrome extension by unpaywall.org. This extension has 657,794 weekly active users, a good user rating of 4.10, and is most similar to Open Access Button and Let Me Read That Article. The latest version, 3.98, was updated 2 years ago.

Stats
Stats date:
Rating: 4.10 (201)
Version: 3.98 (Last updated: 2021-07-29)
Creation date: 2020-02-28
Manifest version: 2
Permissions:
  • *://*.oadoi.org/*
  • storage
Size: 683.01K
URLs: Website
Risk impact: Moderate risk impact
Risk likelihood: Very low risk likelihood
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Unpaywall
Unpaywall (v3.98)
188 48,798
Not available on Edge
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.
Safety
Risk impact

Unpaywall requires some risky permissions and may not be safe to use. Exercise caution when installing this extension. Review carefully before installing.

Risk impact measures the level of extra permissions an extension has access to. A low risk impact extension cannot do much harms, whereas a high risk impact extension can do a lot of damage like stealing your password, bypass your security settings, and access your personal data. High risk impact extensions are not necessarily malicious. However, if they do turn malicious, they can be very harmful.

Risk likelihood

Unpaywall has earned a good reputation and can be trusted.

Risk likelihood measures the probability that a Chrome extension may turn malicious. This is determined by the publisher and the Chrome extension reputation on Chrome Web Store, the amount of time the Chrome extension has been around, and other signals about the Chrome extension. Our algorithms are not perfect, and are subject to change as we discover new ways to detect malicious extensions. We recommend that you always exercise caution when installing a Chrome extension, especially ones with higher risk impact and/or higher risk likelihood.

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Screenshots
User reviews
Doesn't work.
by Lee B Lee B, 2023-01-11

Only tried it on one article, worked first time, gave me the full article without paying. So super happy, thanks.
by David Linder David Linder, 2023-01-07

This extension does NOTHING on sites like New York Times, or Washington Post that all use paywalls.
by Alkaris Alkaris, 2022-11-18
View all user reviews
Promo images
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