unlock research papers free

• Open Access Button

For Libraries

The Open Access Button is now built by OA.Works . Same people, new name! Read more about our rebrand.

The Open Data Button has now merged with the Open Access Button. Your account and request will stay the same, but you'll need to get the new plugin. For more on the changes see our blog .

Thanks for your support! Team Button has now merged with the Open Access Button and our Request system.

Your Account

Avoid Paywalls, Request Research.

Free, legal research articles delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors..

Searching thousands of repositories for access !

Give us a moment.

Get around this paywall in a flash: DOI: 10.1126/science.196.4287.293 URL: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/196/4287/293/tab-pdf PMC (Pubmed Central) ID: PMC4167664 Pubmed ID: 17756097 Title: Ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase: a two-layered, square-shaped molecule of symmetry 422 Citation: Baker, T. S., Eisenberg, D., & Eiserling, F. (1977). Ribulose Bisphosphate Carboxylase: A Two-Layered, Square-Shaped Molecule of Symmetry 422. Science, 196(4287), 293-295. doi:10.1126/science.196.4287.293 or try your favourite citation format (Harvard, Bibtex, etc).

Check out some of our latest requests .

Finding Available Research

Give us a scholarly paper and we’ll search thousands of sources with millions of articles to link you to free, legal, full text articles instantly.

Requesting Research

If we can’t get you access, we’ll start a request for you. We request articles from authors, and guide them on making the work available to you and everyone who needs it.

You can do this from our website, browser extensions, tools for libraries or our API . Take your pick or learn more.

Proudly non-profit • Open source • Library-aligned

Built by OA.Works

Proudly non-profit · open source · library-aligned

About · Requests · API · Bugs · Twitter · Account Login · Status

• Main website
• Rationalwiki / Oliver Smith
• Donation options
• In the media
• Relation to Søren Kierkegaard?

How to use Sci-hub to get academic papers for free

• Post author: Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
• Post published: 10. April 2018
• Post category: Science

I regularly tell people on Twitter to use Sci-hub when they say they can’t access papers:

Yes you can, use Sci hub like normal people do. — Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) April 10, 2018

However, it seems that people don’t really know how to use Sci-hub. So here is a simple, visual guide.

1. Go to the Sci-hub website

The URL may change to the website because the lobbyists of Big Publish (Elsevier, SAGE etc.) constantly try to get government to censor the website as it cuts into their rent-seeking profits . You can find the latest URLs via this handy website called Where is Sci-Hub now? (alternatively, via Wikipedia ). Currently, some working URLs are:

• https://sci.hubg.org/
• https://sci-hub.yncjkj.com (global)
• https://sci-hub.mksa.top/ (global)
• https://sci-hub.it.nf/
• https://sci-hub.st/ ( São Tomé and Príncipe )
• https://sci-hub.do (Dominican Republic)
• https://sci-hub.se/ (Sweden)
• https://sci-hub.shop (global) [redirects]
• https://scihub.bban.top (global) [redirects]
• https://scihub.wikicn.top/ (global) [redirects]
• https://sci-hub.pl/ (Poland)
• https://sci-hub.tw (Taiwan)
• https://sci-hub.si (Slovenia)
• https://mg.scihub.ltd/ (global)

If your country blocks the website, use one of the many free general purpose proxies. I tested hide.me for the purpose of writing this article and it works fine for Sci-hub using the Netherlands exit.

2. Go to the journal publisher’s website

Go to the website of whatever article it is you are trying to get. Here we pretend you want the article in my tweet above:

• Seeber, M., Cattaneo, M., Meoli, M., & Malighetti, P. (2017). Self-citations as strategic response to the use of metrics for career decisions . Research Policy.

The website for this is sciencedirect.com which is Elsevier’s cover name. Then, you locate either the URL for this (i.e. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873331730210X) or the article’s DOI. The DOI is that unique document identifier that begins with “10.”. It is almost always shown somewhere on the site, so you can use search “10.” to find it. In rare cases, it is in the page’s source code or may not exist. If it doesn’t exist, it means you usually can’t get the article thru Sci-hub. When you have the article’s URL/DOI, you simply paste this into the Sci-hub search box. Like this:

Then you click “open” and you should get something like this:

In some cases, this may not work. The APA journals seem to cause issues using the URL approach, so use the DOI approach. Sometimes Sci-hub returns the wrong article (<1% I should guess).

Finding articles from APA journals

These journals refuse to give a DOI and they don’t work with URL either usually. Example this paper . A workaround is to search Crossref for the title which gives the DOI, then use the DOI to fetch the paper as usual:

You Might Also Like

Comparing onanism with child sexual abuse.

Jolly Heretic show 24th August 2020

More about seasteading.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Published: 04 April 2017

Unpaywall finds free versions of paywalled papers

• Dalmeet Singh Chawla  

Nature ( 2017 ) Cite this article

8863 Accesses

9 Citations

552 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Communication

New tool joins a growing collection of software for accessing fee-for-view scientific literature.

An online widget that trawls the Internet searching for free-to-read versions of paywalled papers has been installed more than 10,000 times since its prerelease debut on 10 March, its inventors say. 

Officially launched on 4 April, Unpaywall is a free web-browser extension that hunts for papers in more than 5,300 repositories worldwide, including preprint servers and institutional databases.Once installed in Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, Unpaywall brings up a green or grey tab on the side of the screen when a user hits a paywalled paper. A green ‘unlock’ sign means that a free version of the paper is available elsewhere, whereas a grey ‘lock’ icon means that the tool could not locate a free version.For researchers and librarians, Unpaywall and a growing collection of similar tools promise to simplify the process of finding freely accessible (and legal) copies of research articles.Holly Bik, a marine biologist at the University of California, Riverside, says Unpaywall is especially useful when she is off campus. “I can quickly access and download PDFs of journal articles without having deal with the hassle [of] logging into a VPN connection to access my university journal subscriptions,” she told Nature . And author Nicola Twilley, a contributing writer to The New Yorker who is based in Brooklyn, New York, took to Twitter on 23 March to point out that Unpaywall found her a free version of a study half an hour after she installed it. “I am constantly looking for ways to get hold of academic papers as source material,” she wrote in an e-mail.Rick Anderson, associate dean for collections and scholarly communication at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, says that Unpaywall could alter the calculus that librarians use when choosing subscriptions.“For years, libraries have had little expectation that the [open access] deposit of subscription articles would displace subscription access, mainly because locating those articles and providing access to them would be labor-intensive,” Anderson says. “By making that process so much easier, Unpaywall could really change the game for us.”

Bots galore

Of course, readers have had the ability to find article PDFs online for years, thanks to Google and Google Scholar. But these tools do not always retrieve free articles, says Jason Priem, Unpaywall's co-inventor. That's where Unpaywall and other services come in.

At its heart, Unpaywall provides a simple interface into a database of digital object identifiers (DOIs) — some 86 million in all. In October 2016, Priem and co-inventor Heather Piwowar, who together founded the not-for-profit company Impactstory in Vancouver, Canada, launched oaDOI , an 'application programming interface' (API), or set of programmatic instructions, that allows researchers to search that database for papers on the basis of their DOI. oaDOI is used more than a million times per week, according to Priem; it successfully finds an open-access version of a paper around 30% of the time. Unpaywall basically queries that same database automatically, flagging articles for which a free version is available. oaDOI, in turn, draws inspiration from DOAI (Digital Open Access Identifier), says Priem. DOAI is described on its homepage as an “alternate DOI resolver” that redirects requests to the free version of an article, if available, and otherwise to the paywalled paper itself.According to Piwowar, both oaDOI and Unpaywall include a nimble title-matching feature, which uses an algorithm to compare titles, forgiving spacing and punctuation differences. The idea is to overcome the fact that titles change in different versions of manuscripts, she explains.More than 600 libraries worldwide are using oaDOI, Priem says. The National Library of Sweden, for instance, uses oaDOI in their SwePub analysis system, which integrates the metadata of research published at all of Sweden’s research institutions.“By using oaDOI we have been able to increase our statistics on green open access by 38% and gold open access by 27%,” says Jürgen Kerstna, formerly a system developer at the National Library of Sweden. (Green open-access, also called self-archiving, refers to authors depositing their papers in online repositories; gold open-access is when journal articles are made available by the publisher.)Other tools for mining the open-source literature have been or are being developed. These include the bibliographic databases oaFindr and oaFindr+ ; the Open Access Button , a web-browser extension that searches for open-access papers and allows users to e-mail authors when it cannot find one; and 'pirate' services such as Sci-Hub .

Joseph McArthur, who is assistant director of the Right to Research Coalition policy advocacy group in London, says Open Access Button, which he co-founded, has adopted oaDOI’s freely available API as well as additional aggregators to expand its reach. “We're hoping our projects can work in tandem to provide the community with the best tools possible for legally getting around paywalls,” he says.Another in-development tool, OAbot (Open Access Bot), will search the web for free-to-read versions of papers mentioned in references on Wikipedia pages, says Jake Orlowitz, head of the Wikipedia Library at the Wikimedia Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Once fully launched, references on English Wikipedia pages will be marked with a green unlock icon when a free version of the paper is available. In time, Orlowitz notes, the team aims to use multiple icons to better reflect a paper’s availability — namely, whether it is paywalled, not paywalled but requires registration, free to read but not free to reuse, or free to read as well as reuse.If publishers move toward an open-access model, Unpaywall and its ilk would no longer be needed. Priem, for one, would welcome that change, he says: “I’ll be pulling the plug with a great big smile on my face.”

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Related links

Related links in nature research, related external links, rights and permissions.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Chawla, D. Unpaywall finds free versions of paywalled papers. Nature (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2017.21765

Download citation

Published : 04 April 2017

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2017.21765

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Browse Past Paywalls And Get Open Access To Research Articles For Free

Suppose you have been spending time searching around, and finally found that perfect article. You click in, only to be blocked by a notification that asks you to pay some money before you can read the article. Welcome to the world of article paywalls.

Luckily there are ways to bypass them. Here, we explore various methods that can unlock access to research articles, ensuring that vital information is accessible to you, and a broader audience. 

How To Bypass Paywalls And Get Access To Research Articles

What Is An Article Paywall?

Paywalls in academic publishing exist mainly because publishing is costly, and journals need funds to maintain their operations. Scholarly articles go through extensive peer review and editing processes, and the costs are traditionally covered by subscriptions. Many publishers use paywalls extensively, including:

Fortunately, there are ways you can try to get access to these articles, without having to pay out an arm and a leg. 

1: Try Incognito Mode

Some websites with soft paywalls track the number of free articles you’ve read using cookies. When you reach the limit, the paywall activates. However, if you browse in incognito mode, the site doesn’t recognize you, potentially allowing you to read more articles without paying.

In incognito mode, your browser doesn’t store cookies or your browsing history, which paywalls often use to track how many articles you’ve read.

To use this method:

• Copy the URL of the paywalled article
• Open an incognito window in your web browser
• Paste the URL into the address bar.

This simple step might bypass the soft paywall, allowing you to read your favorite articles. It’s worth noting, though, that this trick mainly works with soft paywalls. A hard paywall, which require a login or subscription to access any content, are less likely to be bypassed this way.

2: Try Reader Mode

Reader mode simplifies the webpage by stripping away most graphics and ads, focusing on the text of the article you want to read.

Interestingly, this can occasionally remove the overlay of a paywall, granting you access to the content behind it.

To try this, when you hit a paywall, look for the ‘reader mode’ icon in your address bar or in the browser menu. This icon often looks like an open book or a small ‘A’ next to a larger ‘A’. Clicking this will switch the page to reader mode.

In some cases, the text of the article, which was blocked by the paywall’s overlay, becomes readable.

This technique tends to work better with soft paywalls, which are designed to limit the number of free articles you can view, rather than hard paywalls that lock content behind mandatory login or subscription.

This isn’t a foolproof method though. Some sites have started designing their paywalls to counter such bypasses. Plus, using reader mode doesn’t always guarantee full access, especially with complex web pages or sites with advanced paywall technologies.

3. Preprint Servers

Preprint servers host versions of academic papers before they undergo the peer-review process. This means you can access the latest research, often the same studies that are behind paywalls in major journals, without paying.

Let’s say you’re searching for a specific article and find it behind a paywall. Your next step should be to check preprint servers like:

• bioRxiv, or

Simply copy the title of the article you want to read, and paste it into the search bar of these servers. More often than not, you might find the preprint version of the article available for free.

Lets say a groundbreaking physics paper published in a journal like the Physical Review Letters might be available for free on arXiv. Similarly, if you’re looking for a paper in biology or medicine, bioRxiv could have the preprint copy.

While preprint versions are not peer-reviewed, they often contain the same core research as the final published version.

This access is especially useful for individuals who don’t have subscription access through a university or research institution.

4: Login With Institutional Access

If you’re affiliated with a university, college, or research institute, you likely have a wealth of resources at your fingertips, often without realizing it. 

Institutions typically pay for subscriptions to a wide range of academic journals and databases, granting their members free access to countless paywalled articles.

If you’re looking for an article from the Journal of Advanced Research, you might find it behind a paywall if you search through a regular browser. However, accessing the same article through your institution’s library system or portal can bypass this paywall seamlessly.

• Log in to your institution’s library website or portal with your credentials.
• Search for the article directly within the library’s search engine
• Sometimes you can use tools like proxy servers or VPNs that your institution might provide.

These tools route your internet connection through the institution’s network, making it appear as if you are accessing the content from within the campus, thereby unlocking access to subscription-based content.

In some cases, institutions also have browser extensions or plugins that simplify this process. For instance, when you land on a paywalled article, the extension can automatically check if your institution has access and redirect you to the login page for immediate access.

5. ResearchGate, Academia.edu Or Google Scholar

Navigating through the maze of research article paywalls becomes much simpler with platforms like:

• ResearchGate
• Academia.edu, and
• Google Scholar.

These sites are treasure troves for academicians and curious minds alike, offering alternative pathways to access scholarly articles that are typically behind paywalls.

ResearchGate and Academia.edu are networks where researchers share their publications and connect with peers. When you find an article you want to read on a journal’s website but hit a paywall, head over to these platforms.

Simply search for the article or the author’s name. You might find the full text of the article uploaded by the author themselves. Researchers often share their work here for wider dissemination, bypassing the paywall restrictions of traditional journals.

Google Scholar, on the other hand, indexes a vast range of scholarly articles and often provides links to free versions hosted on university websites or personal pages of researchers.

While you browse through search results on Google Scholar, look for links that say [PDF] on the right side of the article title. These are usually direct links to free full-text versions of the articles.

6. Ask Authors Directly

One effective and often overlooked method to access paywalled research articles is to directly contact the authors. Many researchers are more than willing to share their work with interested individuals, especially if you explain that you can’t access their work due to a paywall.

Authors typically retain the rights to distribute their own articles for educational and research purposes.

So, if you find an article you want to read but it’s behind a paywall, you can often find the author’s contact information on the same page or by a quick Google search.

Send them a polite email, expressing your interest in their research and your difficulty in accessing it through usual channels.

In many cases, authors are happy to provide a copy of their paper, as it helps increase the reach and impact of their work.

7. Try Browser Extensions

There are extensions can help you access articles that are typically locked behind paywalls. These are usually available for many web browsers, be it Chrome, Firefox, or Edge. Some popular extensions include:

Unpaywall: This is user-friendly tool that can lead you to legally available open access versions of paywalled articles. When you visit a website with a paywalled article, Unpaywall automatically searches for an available free version and provides a direct link to it. 

Bypass Paywalls Clean: this extension works on a broader range of sites, including major news outlets. It allows you to read articles from sites that usually require a subscription. Once installed, this extension helps bypass soft paywalls by manipulating web browser settings.

However, it’s important to use these tools responsibly. While they can provide access to content, they can also raise ethical considerations about the rights of content creators and publishers.

If you frequently find yourself needing access to paywalled content, consider supporting the publishers and authors through subscriptions.

Founded by Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of their paywall status. When you encounter a paywalled article, simply:

• Go to Sci-Hub’s website
• Enter the URL or the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the article
• If available, Sci-Hub will provide you with the full text.

The platform sources its content through various means, often using credentials donated by academics or university networks to access and distribute the articles.

While Sci-Hub has been a boon for researchers, students, and academics in countries or institutions where access to scientific literature is limited or expensive, its legality is highly controversial. The site has faced numerous legal battles and is often blocked in several countries.

It’s crucial to understand that while Sci-Hub provides an easy way to access articles without paying, it operates in a legally grey area. The ethical implications of using such a service should be carefully considered. 

Unlock and Browse Paywalled Articles For Free

While paywalls serve a purpose in the academic publishing world, they need not be a roadblock in your quest for knowledge. Utilizing tools like institutional access, browser extensions, preprint servers, and direct author communication can effectively bypass these barriers.

However, it’s essential to balance these strategies with ethical considerations and support for the scientific community. By exploring these avenues, you can access the rich world of academic research, contributing to a more informed and educated society.

Dr Andrew Stapleton has a Masters and PhD in Chemistry from the UK and Australia. He has many years of research experience and has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate at a number of Universities. Although having secured funding for his own research, he left academia to help others with his YouTube channel all about the inner workings of academia and how to make it work for you.

Thank you for visiting Academia Insider.

We are here to help you navigate Academia as painlessly as possible. We are supported by our readers and by visiting you are helping us earn a small amount through ads and affiliate revenue - Thank you!

2024 © Academia Insider

• Advanced search
• Peer review

Discover relevant research today

Advance your research field in the open

Reach new audiences and maximize your readership

ScienceOpen puts your research in the context of

Publications

For Publishers

ScienceOpen offers content hosting, context building and marketing services for publishers. See our tailored offerings

• For academic publishers  to promote journals and interdisciplinary collections
• For open access journals  to host journal content in an interactive environment
• For university library publishing  to develop new open access paradigms for their scholars
• For scholarly societies  to promote content with interactive features

For Institutions

ScienceOpen offers state-of-the-art technology and a range of solutions and services

• For faculties and research groups  to promote and share your work
• For research institutes  to build up your own branding for OA publications
• For funders  to develop new open access publishing paradigms
• For university libraries to create an independent OA publishing environment

For Researchers

Make an impact and build your research profile in the open with ScienceOpen

• Search and discover relevant research in over 95 million Open Access articles and article records
• Share your expertise and get credit by publicly reviewing any article
• Publish your poster or preprint and track usage and impact with article- and author-level metrics
• Create a topical Collection  to advance your research field

Create a Journal powered by ScienceOpen

Launching a new open access journal or an open access press? ScienceOpen now provides full end-to-end open access publishing solutions – embedded within our smart interactive discovery environment. A modular approach allows open access publishers to pick and choose among a range of services and design the platform that fits their goals and budget.

Continue reading “Create a Journal powered by ScienceOpen”   

What can a Researcher do on ScienceOpen?

ScienceOpen provides researchers with a wide range of tools to support their research – all for free. Here is a short checklist to make sure you are getting the most of the technological infrastructure and content that we have to offer. What can a researcher do on ScienceOpen? Continue reading “What can a Researcher do on ScienceOpen?”   

ScienceOpen on the Road

Upcoming events.

• 15 June – Scheduled Server Maintenance, 13:00 – 01:00 CEST

Past Events

• 20 – 22 February – ResearcherToReader Conference
• 09 November – Webinar for the Discoverability of African Research
• 26 – 27 October – Attending the Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata
• 18 – 22 October – ScienceOpen at Frankfurt Book Fair.
• 27 – 29 September – Attending OA Tage, Berlin .
• 25 – 27 September – ScienceOpen at Open Science Fair
• 19 – 21 September – OASPA 2023 Annual Conference .
• 22 – 24 May – ScienceOpen sponsoring Pint of Science, Berlin.
• 16-17 May – ScienceOpen at 3rd AEUP Conference.
• 20 – 21 April – ScienceOpen attending Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books .

What is ScienceOpen?

• Smart search and discovery within an interactive interface
• Researcher promotion and ORCID integration
• Open evaluation with article reviews and Collections
• Business model based on providing services to publishers

Live Twitter stream

Some of our partners:.

Sci-Hub is the most controversial project in today science. The goal of Sci-Hub is to provide free and unrestricted access to all scientific knowledge ever published in journal or book form.

Today the circulation of knowledge in science is restricted by high prices. Many students and researchers cannot afford academic journals and books that are locked behind paywalls. Sci-Hub emerged in 2011 to tackle this problem. Since then, the website has revolutionized the way science is being done.

Sci-Hub is helping millions of students and researchers, medical professionals, journalists and curious people in all countries to unlock access to knowledge. The mission of Sci-Hub is to fight every obstacle that prevents open access to knowledge: be it legal, technical or otherwise.

To get more information visit the about Sci-Hub section.

Thank you for joining Sci-Hub mailing list!

• Mission and history
• Platform features
• Library Advisory Group
• What’s in JSTOR
• For Librarians
• For Publishers

Open and free content on JSTOR and Artstor

Our partnerships with libraries and publishers help us make content discoverable and freely accessible worldwide

Search open content on JSTOR

Explore our growing collection of Open Access journals

Early Journal Content , articles published prior to the last 95 years in the United States, or prior to the last 143 years if initially published internationally, are freely available to all

Even more content is available when you register to read – millions of articles from nearly 2,000 journals

Thousands of Open Access ebooks are available from top scholarly publishers, including Brill, Cornell University Press, University College of London, and University of California Press – at no cost to libraries or users.

This includes Open Access titles in Spanish:

• Collaboration with El Colegio de México
• Partnership with the Latin American Council of Social Sciences

Images and media

JSTOR hosts a growing number of public collections , including Artstor’s Open Access collections , from museums, archives, libraries, and scholars worldwide.

Research reports

A curated set of more than 34,000 research reports from more than 140 policy institutes selected with faculty, librarian, and expert input.

Resources for librarians

Open content title lists:

• Open Access Journals (xlsx)
• Open Access Books (xlsx)
• JSTOR Early Journal Content (txt)
• Research Reports

Open Access ebook resources for librarians

Library-supported collections

Shared Collections : We have a growing corpus of digital special collections published on JSTOR by our institutional partners.

Reveal Digital : A collaboration with libraries to fund, source, digitize and publish open access primary source collections from under-represented voices.

JSTOR Daily

JSTOR Daily is an online publication that contextualizes current events with scholarship. All of our stories contain links to publicly accessible research on JSTOR. We’re proud to publish articles based in fact and grounded by careful research and to provide free access to that research for all of our readers.

Get Scholarly Articles for Free

Harvard Library has paid for your access to hundreds of websites — from the New York Review of Books to the Oxford English Dictionary to the journal Nature: Chemical Biology . You just need to connect via HarvardKey.

The library offers many tools to quickly check if you have free online access. Each tool has features that you may find helpful at different times. Most people mix and match for different purposes. Find the one that's right for you.

Google Scholar

Get access directly from Google Scholar results.

• Adds the "Try Harvard Library" link to your Google Scholar results
• Selects the best access point for you

Browser Extensions

Adding a browser extension is a way to get articles Harvard Library pays for - no matter what website you're using.

Lean Library

Install the Lean Library plugin to automate access.

• Checks every website that you visit and reloads via Harvard Key automatically
• Notifies you if an ebook or online article is available via Harvard
• No action required: Lean Library is always working in the background
• May sign you out of personally subscribed accounts

Check Harvard Library Bookmarklet

Get one-click access with the Check Harvard Library Bookmark.

• Works on most browsers, including on your phone
• Reloads the page you're on via Harvard Key
• You're in control: use the bookmark when you want to check for access

Check Harvard Library Bookmark

Stay current with your favorite academic journals, preview the table of contents, and never miss a new article. Harvard Library offers free accounts.

Library Access via VPN

Harvard vpn.

Don't want to keep logging in using HarvardKey? Searching for articles while abroad? You can get the same access as a campus computer by installing and configuring a Harvard VPN.

• Generally removes the need to log in to Harvard Key
• Some sites won't recognize VPN, some sites only work on VPN
• Can be helpful for access outside of the United States

Instructions on how to install the VPN client (via HUIT)

Ask a Librarian

Looking for another type of access or free articles? Find answers to commonly asked questions and ask your own. Library staff members are also available via chat during posted hours.

• Discover Data
• Discover Journals
• Discover Literature
• Open Access Search
• Access Journals
• Open Access Journal
• Search Engine

Our Research

Did you create this tool? Get in touch!

SpringerOpen

The SpringerOpen portfolio has grown tremendously since its launch in 2010, so that we now offer researchers from all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences a place to publish open access in journals. Publishing with SpringerOpen makes your work freely available online for everyone, immediately upon publication, and our high-level peer-review and production processes guarantee the quality and reliability of the work. Open access books are published by our Springer imprint.

Find the right journal for you

Explore our subject areas, learn all about open access.

• Browse our alphabetical journal list
• Explore our journals by subject
• Tips for finding the right journal
• Find the right journal with our Journal Suggester
• Find out if open access book publishing is right for you

• Visit our subject pages covering all subject areas in science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences

Visit the Springer Author & Reviewer tutorials and learn all about open access, your benefits, mandates, funding, copyright and more in the different interactive tutorials. And take our quiz to test your knowledge!

• C heck out the free tutorials
• Take the quiz

Video library

Your browser needs to have JavaScript enabled to view this video

Our video library contains how-to videos, videos on the research we publish and journal videos. 

We need your support today

Independent journalism is more important than ever. Vox is here to explain this unprecedented election cycle and help you understand the larger stakes. We will break down where the candidates stand on major issues, from economic policy to immigration, foreign policy, criminal justice, and abortion. We’ll answer your biggest questions, and we’ll explain what matters — and why. This timely and essential task, however, is expensive to produce.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

The war to free science

How librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls.

by Brian Resnick and Julia Belluz

Illustrations by Javier Zarracina

The 27,500 scientists who work for the University of California generate 10 percent of all the academic research papers published in the United States.

Their university recently put them in a strange position: Starting July 10, these scientists will not be able to directly access much of the world’s published research they’re not involved in.

That’s because in February , the UC system — one of the country’s largest academic institutions, encompassing Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis, and several other campuses — dropped its nearly $11 million annual subscription to Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of academic journals.

On the face of it, this seemed like an odd move. Why cut off students and researchers from academic research?

In fact, it was a principled stance that may herald a revolution in the way science is shared around the world.

The University of California decided it doesn’t want scientific knowledge locked behind paywalls, and thinks the cost of academic publishing has gotten out of control.

Elsevier owns around 3,000 academic journals, and its articles account for some 18 percent of all the world’s research output. “They’re a monopolist, and they act like a monopolist,” says Jeffrey MacKie-Mason , head of the campus libraries at UC Berkeley and co-chair of the team that negotiated with the publisher. Elsevier makes huge profits on its journals , generating billions of dollars a year for its parent company RELX.

This is a story about more than subscription fees. It’s about how a private industry has come to dominate the institutions of science, and how librarians, academics, and even pirates are trying to regain control.

The University of California is not the only institution fighting back. “There are thousands of Davids in this story,” says the head of campus libraries at the University of California Davis MacKenzie Smith, who, like other librarians around the world, has been pushing for more open access to science. “But only a few big Goliaths.”

Will the Davids prevail?

The academic publishing industry, explained

Imagine your tax dollars have gone to build a new road in your neighborhood.

Now imagine that the company overseeing the road work charged its workers a fee rather than paying them a salary.

The overseers in charge of making sure the road was up to standard also weren’t paid. And if you, the taxpayer, want to access the road today, you need to buy a seven-figure annual subscription or pay high fees for one-off trips.

We’re not talking about roads — this is the state of scientific research, and how it’s distributed today through academic publishing.

Indeed, the industry built to publish and disseminate scientific articles — companies such as Elsevier and Springer Nature — has managed to become incredibly profitable by getting a lot of taxpayer-funded, highly skilled labor for free and affixing a premium price tag to its goods.

Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish. Peer reviewers, the overseers tasked with making sure the science published in the journals is up to standard, typically aren’t paid either.

And there’s more: Academic institutions have to purchase exorbitant subscriptions priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars each year so they can download and read their own and other scientists’ work from beyond the paywall. The same goes for members of the public who want to access the science they’ve funded with their tax dollars. A single research paper in Science can set you back $30 . Elsevier’s journals can cost, individually, thousands of dollars a year for a subscription .

Publishers and journal editors say there are steep costs associated with digital publishing, and that they add value at every step: They oversee and manage peer reviewers and editors, act as quality gatekeepers, and publish an ever-larger number of articles each year.

We spoke with executives at both Elsevier and Springer Nature, and they maintain their companies still provide a lot of value in ensuring the quality of academic research. It’s true these companies are not predatory journals , businesses that will publish just about any paper — without any scientific vetting — for a fee.

In 2018, Elsevier’s revenue grew by 2 percent , to a total of $3.2 billion. Gemma Hersh, a senior vice president for global policy at Elsevier, says the company’s net profit margin was 19 percent (more than double the net profit of Netflix ).

But critics, including open access crusaders, think the business model is due for a change. “I think we’re nearing the tipping point, and the industry is going to change, just like the industry for recorded music has changed, the industry for movies has changed,” MacKie-Mason says. “[The publishers] know it’s going to happen. They just want to protect their profits and their business model as long as they can.”

It’s a business model as convoluted as the road you paid for but can’t use. And it grows more expensive for universities every year.

Now the status quo is slowly shifting. There is a small army of people who aren’t putting up with the gouging any longer.

This disparate band of revolutionaries is waging war on the scientific publishing industrial complex on three fronts:

• Librarians and science funders are playing hardball to negotiate lower subscription fees to scientific journals.
• Scientists, increasingly, are realizing they don’t need paywalled academic journals to act as gatekeepers anymore. They’re finding clever workarounds, making the services that journals provide free.
• Open access crusaders, including science pirates, have created alternatives that free up journal articles and pressure publishers to expand access.

If they succeed, the cloistered, paywalled way that science has been disseminated for the past century could undergo a massive transformation. The walls, in other words, could fall.

If paywalls fall, the impact would reverberate globally. When science is locked behind paywalls, it means cancer patients can’t easily access and read the research on their conditions (even though research is often taxpayer-funded). When scholars can’t read the latest research, “that hinders the research they can do, and slows down the progress of humanity,” MacKie-Mason says.

But there’s a big thing getting in the way of a revolution: prestige-obsessed scientists who continue to publish in closed-access journals. They’re like the road workers who keep paying fees to build infrastructure they can’t freely access. Until that changes, the walls will remain firmly intact.

How academic journals became so unaffordable

Scientific journals, published mainly by small scientific societies, sprouted up alongside the printing industry in the 17th century as a way to disseminate science and information about scientific meetings.

The first scientific journals, the Journal des sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London , were distributed via mail. Like all pre-internet publishing models, early journals sold subscriptions. It wasn’t the hugely profitable industry it is today.

After World War II, the business changed dramatically. The journals — which were mostly based in Europe — focused on selling subscriptions internationally, targeting American universities flush with Cold-War era research funding. “They realized you can charge a library a lot more than an individual scholar,” says Aileen Fyfe , a historian specializing in academic publishing at the University of St. Andrews.

As more and more journals popped up, publishing companies began consolidating. In the 1950s, major publishers started to purchase journals, transforming a once diffuse business into what’s been called an oligopoly : a market controlled by a tiny number of producers.

By the early 1970s, just five companies — Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis — published one-fifth of all natural and medical scientific articles, according to an analysis in PLOS One . By 2013, their share rose to 53 percent.

No single publisher embodies the consolidation, and the increase of costs, more than Elsevier, the biggest and most powerful scientific publisher in the world. The Dutch company now publishes nearly half a million articles in its 3,000 journals, including the influential Cell , Current Biology , and The Lancet .

And the consolidation, the lack of competition, means publishers can get away with charging very high prices.

When the internet arrived, electronic PDFs became the main medium through which articles were disseminated. At that point, “librarians were optimistic this was going to be the solution; at last, journals are going to become much, much cheaper,” Fyfe says.

But instead of adopting a new business and pricing model to match the new means of no-cost dissemination, consolidation gave academic publishers the freedom to raise prices. Starting in the late 1990s, publishers increasingly pushed sales of their subscriptions into large bundled deals. In this model, universities pay a hefty price to get a huge subset of a publisher’s journals, instead of purchasing individual titles.

The publishers argue the new mode of digital delivery has come with an array of additional costs. “We’re continuing to invest significantly in digital infrastructure, which has a lot of fixed costs that repeat each year. We’re employing thousands of technologists,” said Elsevier’s Gemma Hersh. “So it’s not the case that digital is cheaper.”

The publishers also say that the volume of articles they publish every year increases costs, and that libraries ought to be funded to pay for them. “The libraries are treated by the senior academics at these institutions as a fixed cost; they’re not a fixed cost,” says Steven Inchcoombe, the chief publishing officer at Springer Nature, which publishes the prestigious Nature family of journals.

In a July 10 statement , Hersh said of Elsevier’s battle with the UC system “this stalemate was avoidable” and that the company hopes “we can find a pragmatic way forward if there is will and engagement from both sides.”

The librarians beg to differ. For universities, the most frustrating development is that cost of access keeps rising at a very steep rate.

Take a look at this graph from the Association of Research Libraries. It shows the percent change in spending at university libraries. The category “ongoing resources expenditures” includes spending on academic journals, and it rose 521 percent between 1986 and 2014. Over that time, the consumer price index — the average increase of costs of common household goods — rose 118 percent.

Librarians at the breaking point

The University of Virginia has a website where you can see how much money its library is spending on journals. From 2016 to 2018, the costs for Elsevier journals increased by $118,000 for the university, from $1.716 million a year to $1.834 million.

The data shows that the university is also spending a lot of money for journals that no one who uses their library system reads. In 2018, the university paid Springer Nature $672,000 for nearly 4,000 journals — 1,400 of which no one ever accessed. No one at UVA read the Moscow University Chemistry Bulletin , or Lithology and Mineral Resources , for example.

Why are universities paying for journals that no one reads? “It’s a lot like the cable bundle — they tell you you’re getting 250 channels, but if you look inside your heart, you know all you want is ESPN and AMC,” says Brandon Butler , director of information policy at the University of Virginia Library. An individual journal subscription can cost a university thousands of dollars. “UVA is absolutely considering cutting these bundles,” he says. “It’s quite likely we will, unless the price and other terms change radically.”

As the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill librarian, Elaine Westbrooks is facing what she and so many other academic librarians call the “serials crisis”: “If we buy the exact same journals every year, I have to pay at least $500,000 more just for inflation,” she says. “I can’t afford it.”

In her ongoing negotiations with Elsevier, Westbrooks is considering “the nuclear option,” as she puts it. That is, canceling the subscription that gives UNC Chapel Hill students and faculty access to thousands of Elsevier journals.

“It felt very much in 2017 the librarians felt beaten by the system and they couldn’t afford it,” says David Stuart, the researcher behind a yearly survey on the academic publishing industry. “Whereas in 2018, you could feel there was a bit more strength and power emerging, and they had the ability to push back on the publishers a bit.”

Science funders increasingly are calling for open access

It’s not only librarians waking up to the fact that the costs of accessing science are unsustainable — so are science funders. A lot of the money that fuels this system comes from government grants. In the US, taxpayers spend $140 billion every year supporting research, a huge percentage of which they cannot access for free. When scientists do want to make their work open access (meaning published without a paywall), they’re charged an extra fee for that as well.

This year, a consortium of public research institutions in Norway canceled its Elsevier contract, a move that followed a research consortium in Hungary breaking ties with the Dutch giant. In Germany , nearly 700 libraries and research institutes made a deal with the publisher Wiley: For about 25 million euros, they’re paying to access journal content — but also demanding the work of their researchers, published in Wiley journals, be made open access for all at no additional cost.

These institutions and funders are also banding together as part of Coalition S : The agreement says all scientific publications that have sprung from publicly funded research grants must be published on open access journals or platforms by 2020.

“The ambition is if the University of California does this deal, Germany does this deal — we eventually get to the point where [all science is] open access. The libraries are no longer paying to subscribe, they’re paying to publish,” said Robert Kiley, the head of open research at the UK’s Wellcome Trust.

But open access doesn’t necessarily mean cheap. Currently, publishers typically charge academics to publish that way too. If you want your article to be open access in an Elsevier journal, you could pay anywhere from $500 — the fee to publish in Chemical Data Collections — up to $5,000, the fee to publish in European Urology.

“Open access is absolutely in the best interest of the research process,” Inchcoombe, the chief publishing officer at Springer Nature, says. “If you can pay once and then it’s free for everybody, you eliminate a lot of the friction from the system of access and entitlement.” He hopes publishing will transition, over time, to open access.

But he stresses that open access won’t change “the fact that if you do more research, and you want to communicate it to more people, then there is a cost of doing that that rises with volume.”

Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end.

This brings us to another band of revolutionaries in the fight against the status quo: the scientists who want to find ways to circumvent the behemoth publishers.

Some scientists are saying no to the big publishers and spinning off open access journals of their own

The structure of academic publishing isn’t just a pain for librarians and funders; it’s a bad deal for academics too. Basically, scientists trade in their hard work, their results for their toils in the lab, for free, to a private industry that makes tons of money off their work, in return for prestige.

Some researchers have been waking up to this and spinning off freely accessible journals of their own. One of those scholars is a University of Cambridge mathematician named Timothy Gowers . In 2012, he wrote a post bemoaning the exorbitant prices that journals charge for access to research and vowed to stop sending his papers to any journal from Elsevier .

To his surprise, the post went viral — and spurred a boycott of Elsevier by researchers around the world. Within days , hundreds of researchers left comments commiserating with Gowers, a winner of the prestigious Fields Medal. Encouraged by that response, in 2016, Gowers launched a new online mathematics journal called Discrete Analysis . The nonprofit venture is owned and published by a team of scholars. With no publisher middlemen, access is completely free for all.

University of Montreal professor and open access researcher Vincent Larivière has helped take the Elsevier boycott another step further. In January 2019, the entire editorial board of the Elsevier-owned Journal of Informetrics (including Larivière) resigned , and moved to MIT Press to start another open access journal, Quantitative Science Studies .

Again, the move was a principled one. “There’s a universalistic aspect to science, where you want it to be available to everyone,” Larivière said.

Even in the absence of starting open access journals, though, some scientists have been taking quieter, but equally principled, stands. One paleontologist took his name off a paper because his co-authors wouldn’t publish in an open access journal.

One key reason scientists, librarians, and funders can fight back is because other crusaders have made research more accessible. Enter the pirates.

Pirating and preprints are also pressuring the publishing industry to increase access

Over the past decade, it’s been getting easier and easier to circumvent the paywalls and find free research online. One big reason: pirates, including Kazakh neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan. Her (illegal) website Sci-Hub sees more than 500,000 visitors daily, and hosts more than 50 million academic papers.

But Sci-Hub is just one tool to get around paywalls. Scientists are also increasingly publishing prepublication versions of their studies (often called preprints). These study drafts are free to access.

The problem is that often, these studies have not yet been peer-reviewed. But advocates of preprints say they’re a net benefit to science: They allow for the public discussion of papers before they’re set in a finalized form — a type of peer review. And there are more preprints than ever before. (Some of the preprint servers are owned by the big publishers too.)

To find these preprints, all it takes is a single click: Unpaywall , a browser extension, helps users find the preprints associated with paywalled journal articles.

These mounting pressures on the academic publishing industry aren’t so different from the pressures on the music industry in the late ’90s. If you recall, in the late ’90s, music pirating was suddenly everywhere. You could log in to Napster and Limewire and illegally download any song you wanted for free.

“Piracy seems to come in when there’s a market failure,” UVA’s Butler says, “and people aren’t getting what they need at a price that makes sense for them.”

But as Larivière points out, Sci-Hub isn’t a long-term solution, and eventually, it may not even be needed: “Once there’s no paywalls, there’s no Sci-Hub anymore.”

What’s standing in the way of a full-on revolution? The culture of science.

For now, the paywalls mostly stand. Elsevier’s profits have actually increased in recent years. And as Elsevier’s Hersh told us, while the volume of open access research published by the company has been growing, so has the volume of paywalled papers.

Even with the growing pressure from the open science crusaders, the publishers remain in an extremely strong and nimble position. More and more, Elsevier’s business is not in the publication of journal articles, but in data-mining its enormous library. That means it’s using analytics to report on research trends, recommend articles scientists ought to be reading, and suggest co-authors to collaborate with based on shared interests.

Even if the publishers lose ground on selling subscriptions, they’ll still offer a profitable service based on control of the content. Still, it’s not hard to imagine a future where more and more institutions of science simply ignore, or circumvent, the major publishers.

The growing popularity of preprints is giving them one avenue to escape. One could imagine a system where researchers upload their drafts to preprint servers and then other academics choose to peer-review the articles. After peer review and revision, that preprint paper could be given a stamp of approval and added to a digital journal. This system is called an overlay journal (in that the editing and journal gatekeeping is overlain on top of preprints), and it already exists to a small extent . (Gowers’s Discrete Analysis is an overlay journal.)

So it’s not technology or innovation holding science back from a revolution. “The biggest elephant in the room is how researchers are rewarded for the work they do,” said Theodora Bloom , the executive editor at BMJ .

At the moment, researchers’ careers — the grants they’re given, the promotions they attain — rise or fall based on the number of publications they have in high-profile (or high-impact) journals.

“If an academic has a paper in Nature or Science, that’s seen as their passport to their next grant or promotion,” said Bloom.

As long as those incentives exist, and scientists continue to accept that status quo, open access journals won’t be able to compete. In fact, many academics still don’t publish in open access journals . One big reason: Some feel they’re less prestigious and lower quality , and that they push the publishing costs on the scientists.

“I’m also waiting to see change within academic culture,” says Fyfe, the historian. “Until we have enough academics who are willing to do something different, then I don’t see a big change happening.”

So for now, the revolution is just beginning. “Everyone agrees, in some way, the future is open access,” UVA’s Butler says. “Now the question is, in that future, how much control do the big publishers retain over every step in the scientific process? They’ve been working for over a decade to ensure the answer is the most possible control.”

Academic publishing isn’t a hot-button political topic. But it could be. “If citizens really cared, they could talk to their representatives and senators and tell them open access matters,” MacKie-Mason says, “and the government should get involved in changing this.“

• Future Perfect
• The Highlight

Most Popular

• There’s a fix for AI-generated essays. Why aren’t we using it?
• Did Brittany Mahomes’s Donald Trump support put her on the outs with Taylor Swift?
• Conservatives are shocked — shocked! — that Tucker Carlson is soft on Nazis
• The hidden reason why your power bill is so high
• America’s love affair with the increasingly weird Kennedys

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Explainers

The case for and against fracking, politics aside.

From granola bars to chips, more studies are revealing that UPFs are tied to diseases like cancer and depression.

The factors that lead to tragedies like the Apalachee High School shooting are deeply ingrained in US politics, culture, and law.

Polls show a tight race. But there are other figures that can help explain where this campaign is headed.

The raids come amid escalating violence in the Palestinian territory.

The privately funded venture will test out new aerospace technology.

Start your free trial

Arrange a trial for your organisation and discover why FSTA is the leading database for reliable research on the sciences of food and health.

REQUEST A FREE TRIAL

• Research Skills Blog

5 free and legal ways to get the full text of research articles

By Carol Hollier on 07-Apr-2021 13:23:17

1.  Use your library if you have one !

If you are affiliated with a university, you probably have free library access to the full text of millions of research articles.   The library will have subscribed to these journals on your behalf. The smartest thing you can do for accessing research articles is familiarize yourself with your own library.

• If you search a database your library will link from the records to the full text if they have it—all you need to do is click through the links.
• When they do not have a copy of an article, a university library can get it for you from another library. This inter-library loan service is usually free to users.
• Your library might use a browser extension like Lean Library or LibKey Nomad to link you to the library subscription or open access full text from wherever you are on the internet.
• Google Scholar lets you configure your account to get links straight to your library’s subscription copy of an article.  But remember--side-by-side to library subscriptions for legitimate research, Google Scholar includes links to articles published in predatory and unreliable journals that would be unwise to credit in your own work.  Learn more about predatory journals.

If you are not affiliated with a university library, there are still ways you can successfully—and legally—get the full text of research articles.

2.  Open Access browser extensions  

More and more research is published Open Access as governments around the world are mandating that research paid for by taxpayer money be freely available to those taxpayers.

Browser extensions have been created to make it easy to spot when the full text of an article is free.   Some of the best are CORE Discovery , Unpaywall and Open Access Button .

Learn more about difference between discovery and access and why it matters for good research: Where to search - Best Practice for Literature Searching - LibGuides at IFIS

3. Google Scholar

You can search the article title inside quotation marks on Google Scholar to see if a link to a copy of the article appears.   If it does, be sure to pay attention to what version of the article you are linking to, to be sure you are getting what you think you’re getting.  These links can lead to an article's published version of record, a manuscript version, or to a thesis or conference proceeding with the same title and author as the article you expected to find.   

4.  Researcher platforms

 A Google Scholar search might lead you to a researcher platform like Academia.edu or ResearchGate .   There, if you set up an account, you can sometimes download or request a copy of the text.  Again, pay attention to which version of the text you get!

5.  Write to the author

If you can’t get a copy by other means, you can write to an article’s corresponding author and (politely!) ask them to send you a copy. Their contact information, usually an email address, will be listed in the information you find about the article, either in a database record for the article or on the publishing journal’s page for it. Many authors are happy to share a copy of their work.

Three bonus ways that might work depending on where you live:

1.  A nearby university library might offer access to articles even if you do not work or study there.

Members of the public are sometimes allowed access to university journal subscriptions through visitor access or a walk-in user service. You usually need to use the collections from a dedicated computer terminal located in a library and may need to make an appointment before you go. Do your research before showing up to make sure you bring the correct documents and equipment (like a flash drive) along.

2.  Try your public library

In some countries, public libraries partner with publishers to give the public access to research articles.   In the UK, for instance, many public libraries participate in the Access to Research scheme, which gives members of the public on-site access to over 30 million academic articles. Contact your local public library to learn what is available to you.

3.  Research4Life

In other countries, your institution might have access to a massive collection of research articles and databases through the publisher/library/United Nations agency initiative Research4Life . Check to see if you already have access, and if not, if your institution might be eligible to join. Membership is only available on an organizational or institutional level.  

Remember —even though you now have a lot of strategies for finding the full text of articles, research should never be led by the articles you can access most easily.

Good research is driven by first figuring out what articles are most relevant to your question and then getting the full text of what you need. One of the best ways to do this is to use a good discipline-specific database, like FSTA for the sciences of food and health.  

Learn more about difference between discovery and access and why it matters for good research:

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

• FSTA - Food Science & Technology Abstracts
• IFIS Collections
• Resources Hub
• Diversity Statement
• Sustainability Commitment
• Company news
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use for IFIS Collections

Ground Floor, 115 Wharfedale Road,  Winnersh Triangle, Wokingham, Berkshire RG41 5RB

Get in touch with IFIS

© International Food Information Service (IFIS Publishing) operating as IFIS – All Rights Reserved     |     Charity Reg. No. 1068176     |     Limited Company No. 3507902     |     Designed by Blend

15 Best Websites to Download Research Papers for Free

Is your thirst for knowledge limited by expensive subscriptions? Explore the best websites to download research papers for free and expand your academic reach.

With paywalls acting like impenetrable fortresses, accessing scholarly articles becomes a herculean task. However, a beacon of hope exists in the form of free-access platforms, quenching our thirst for intellectual wisdom. Let’s set sail on this scholarly journey.

Table of Contents

Today’s champions of academia aren’t just about offering free access, they uphold ethics and copyright respectability. Let’s delve into these repositories that are reshaping the academia world. You can download free research papers from any of the following websites.

Best Websites to Download Research Papers

#1. sci-hub – best for accessing paywalled academic papers.

Despite its contentious standing, Sci-Hub offers an invaluable service to knowledge-seekers. While navigating the tightrope between access and legality, it represents a game-changing force in the world of academic research.

#2. Library Genesis (Libgen) – Best for a Wide Range of Books and Articles

It’s not just a repository, but a vibrant confluence of multiple disciplines and interests, catering to the unique intellectual appetite of each knowledge seeker.

You might also like:

What are the benefits of Libgen?

Source: https://libgen.is

#3. Unpaywall – Best for Legal Open Access Versions of Scholarly Articles

What are the benefits of Unpaywall?

#4. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – Best for Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journals

Source: https://doaj.org

#5. Open Access Button – Best for Free Versions of Paywalled Articles

What are the benefits of Open Access Button?

#6. Science Open – Best for a Wide Variety of Open Access Scientific Research

Consider Science Open as a bustling town square in the city of scientific knowledge, where scholars from all walks of life gather, discuss, and dissect over 60 million articles. 

#7. CORE – Best for Open Access Content Across Disciplines

With its unparalleled aggregation and comprehensive access, CORE embodies the grand orchestra of global research. It stands as an essential tool in the modern researcher’s toolkit.

#8. ERIC – Best for Education Research

What are the benefits of ERIC?

#9. PaperPanda – Best for Free Access to Research Papers

It’s like having a personal research assistant, guiding you through the maze of scholarly literature.

Source: https://paperpanda.app

#10. Citationsy Archives – Best for Research Papers from Numerous Fields

Source: https://citationsy.com

#11. OA.mg – Best for Direct Download Links to Open Access Papers

Source: https://oa.mg

#12. Social Science Research Network (SSRN) – Best for Social Sciences and Humanities Research

SSRN serves as an invaluable resource for researchers in the social sciences and humanities, fostering a community that drives innovation and advancements in these fields.

#13. Project Gutenberg – Best for Free Access to eBooks

Project Gutenberg serves as a testament to the power of literature and the accessibility of knowledge. It enables readers worldwide to embark on intellectual journeys through its extensive collection of free eBooks.

Source: https://www.gutenberg.org

#14. PLOS (Public Library of Science) – Best for Open Access to Scientific and Medical Research

As a leading publisher of open access research, PLOS fosters the dissemination of cutting-edge scientific discoveries to a global audience. 

PLOS stands at the forefront of the open access movement, promoting the free flow of scientific and medical knowledge. It represents the spirit of collaboration and transparency, empowering researchers to push the boundaries of human understanding.

#15. arXiv.org – Best for Preprints in Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science

What are the benefits of arXiv?

In a world where knowledge is king, accessing a research paper shouldn’t feel like an impossible task. Thanks to these free and innovative websites, we can escape the barriers of paywalls and dive into a vast ocean of intellectual wealth. 

From the rebellious spirit of Sci-Hub to the collaborative nature of PLOS, these digital champions are reshaping the academic landscape.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

“The only truly modern academic research engine”

Oa.mg is a search engine for academic papers, specialising in open access. we have over 250 million papers in our index..