ourresearch/unpaywall-extension

Firefox/Chrome extension that gives you a link to a free PDF when you view scholarly articles

Summary

The repository contains the Unpaywall browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, written in JavaScript. Its stated job is to provide a link to a free PDF while someone is viewing a scholarly article, reducing the need to search separately for a free copy.

What it is useful for

This extension is useful in day-to-day research and article-review workflows. For example, a researcher reading a scholarly article in Chrome or Firefox can use the extension’s link to move directly to a free PDF instead of treating the article page as the only available route. It also gives engineers a concrete browser-based tool to evaluate when their teams need a quicker path from scholarly content to a free full-text document.

The repository is listed as MIT-licensed and is not archived. However, its README is very brief. It does not list the article sites or publishers covered, explain how articles are detected, describe what happens when no free PDF is available, or document data collection and privacy behavior. Those details should not be inferred from the repository description alone.

How engineers can use it

To try the extension in a real workflow:

1. Use Chrome or Firefox, the two browser families named by the project.
2. Consult the README and the official extension documentation it links to. The README does not provide installation commands or a complete setup procedure, so it is not possible to reproduce installation from the repository text alone.
3. Open a scholarly article and look for the extension-provided link to a free PDF. This article-to-free-PDF flow is the main behavior described by the project.
4. If the extension is being evaluated for a team workflow, test it on the article pages users actually visit and note cases where a PDF link is not shown. The README does not define those edge cases, so checking representative pages is more reliable than assuming coverage.

For engineers working with the source, the repository identifies the implementation language as JavaScript, but it provides no documented local development workflow, build instructions, test commands, browser-version requirements, release process, configuration options, or backend/service dependencies. It also does not describe an extension API that another application can call. The practical starting point is therefore to read the linked documentation, install the extension according to that guidance, and verify its behavior on the scholarly pages relevant to your work.