How to Download a Scientific Paper for Free
Everything you need to know
Email the Author
Authors make zero money when you purchase their papers from publications. The amount you pay for the scientific paper always goes to the publisher. I’ve published 3 papers till now and I’ve made zero dollars but all my publishers charge money for them.
Many authors are happy to help you out and will email you the PDF of their paper for free. But sometimes the authors can’t mail the paper because a lot of journals or publications take the rights to their work. Emailing the author should be your last resort after you exhausted all the steps listed below.
Because most authors nowadays don’t have the rights to their work anymore as I mentioned and also many authors don’t often respond because of tight schedules.
Now let’s see what other ways you can get a Scientific or Research paper for free.
Google Search
Google is your friend when you want to learn things and it sure can help in your research and your ever-curious mind. When you want to read a paper, just type in:
"Title of the paper" PDFThis will takes you straight to the copy of the paper that is openly available on the web for free. This step works often because of Google Scholar. It indexes preprints on researcher webpages.
DOI
A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier or handle that is used to uniquely identify various objects and is standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It is assigned to a digital object in this case a research paper and is used to locate the paper easily. It is like ISBN for books except better it links to the publishers' website for the paper.
You need to find the DOI of a paper to get access to in the next steps. You can find the DOI of paywalled scientific papers easily by searching for the title of the paper on Google. Now that you got the DOI let’s get to the next step.
You got the DOI
OA.mg
OA.mg is an academic paper search engine. OA.mg is the place to go if you want to find a specific paper, research from a field, or all of an author’s works.
Knowledge should be accessible to all.
Publicly funded universities and researchers publish their findings in papers, and many of these papers are Open Access. OA.mg is a portal to such papers and a repository for most of the Open Access papers.
OA.mg has more papers and more full-text PDFs than any other research engine. You can filter by OA status, a number of citations, and many more advanced search filters.
PaperPanda
PaperPanda is a free browser extension that can access millions of papers with a few clicks. Simply click the tiny panda in your toolbar, and it will run off to find the paper for you.
It will give access to millions of research paper PDFs on thousands of academic websites with a single click. It keeps you from wasting time navigating paywalls, logins, and redirects.
When you activate PaperPanda, it detects the DOI of the paper from the current page and searches for it. It begins by searching Open Access repositories such as OpenAccessButton, OaDoi, SemanticScholar, Core, ArXiV, and the Internet Archive. PaperPanda will then automatically search your library for the paper.
Unpaywall
Just like PaperPanda, Unpaywall is also a browser extension. It is an open database of over 30 million academic papers. It will help you in accessing the full text of scholarly articles as you browse. When you view a research article, Unpaywall searches our database of 30 million free, legal full-text PDFs for a copy.
Unpaywall directs you to author-posted legal manuscripts hosted on university and government web servers. Unpaywall refers to versions that have been posted with the full and explicit permission of the publishers.
arXiv
arXiv is a free distribution service and open-access archive that houses two million scholarly articles in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
bioRxiv
Even though arXiv has papers related to Biology. bioRxiv is more catered towards biology and life sciences. It has free research papers wide range of topics from Animal Behavior to Zoology.
No Luck?
Sci-Hub
Sci-Hub is a website that provides free access to research papers and journal articles. Simply enter the DOI of the journal article you want to read into ScienceHub to get the PDF for free. The site provides free access to journal articles and academic papers.
Currently, there are 9,33,189,871 papers and PDFs in the Sci-Hub library.
If you still have no luck finding the paper you want. You should browse a subreddit called r/Scholar
r/Scholar
This subreddit is for requesting and sharing specific articles available in various databases. A lot of people use it to exchange papers here. You can post a request here and someone who has access to it might send you the paper.
Doesn’t have a DOI
If you’re looking for an academic book, it probably doesn’t have a DOI. You can use:
LibGen
Library Genesis, also known as LibGen, is the world’s largest digital book collection. It has more than 3 million non-fiction books, 80 scientific papers, 3 million fiction books, and around 1 million magazines.
