Compare Chrome extensions: Unpaywall vs Sci-Hub X Now!

Stats Unpaywall Unpaywall Sci-Hub X Now! Sci-Hub X Now!
User count 700,000+ 208,615+
Average rating 4.05 4.71
Rating count 227 83
Last updated 2021-07-30 2023-02-07
Size 683.01K 58.47K
Version 3.98 0.2.2
Short description
Legally get full text of scholarly articles as you browse. Free access to academic papers with just a single click via sci-hub!
Full 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.

Opens the sci-hub page for the article you want to read.

When on a publisher's page for an academic article, click the sci-hub "bird" icon to download the pdf or go to the corresponding sci-hub page (configure behavior in "options"). Works by searching for the doi anywhere on the page and then navigating to the corresponding sci-hub url.

Allows you to change the sci-hub domain in "preferences"/"options" in case the sci-hub mirror changes. The extension will automatically check if the server is down each time you click the extension and direct you to the options page to change the domain if so.

Note: This is a continuation of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sci-hub-now/ by 0x01h but he no longer maintains it. I have made minor modifications and will continue maintaining it until at least 2024.