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Unpaywall Scraper

Discover open access research articles with our powerful Unpaywall scraper! Search through millions of articles in the Unpaywall database to find free-to-read scholarly publications. Perfect for researchers, librarians, and academics who need to find and access open access articles efficiently.

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📚 Unpaywall Scraper

🚀 Find open-access versions of academic papers in minutes. Search by keyword or DOI. Export paper titles, authors, DOIs, and free PDF links. No coding, no API key required.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-04-16 · 📚 Open access links · 🔍 Keyword + DOI search · 📄 PDF URLs · 🚫 No auth required

The Unpaywall Scraper finds free, legal, open-access versions of academic papers using the Unpaywall database. Search by keyword or DOI and get back paper metadata plus direct links to open-access PDFs when available. Filter for open-access papers only.

Unpaywall tracks over 30 million free-to-read scholarly articles. This Actor exports structured open-access paper data for research, library services, and academic workflows.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Academic researchers, librarians, data scientists, science journalists, open-access advocates	Open access paper discovery, PDF sourcing, literature reviews, institutional repository enrichment

📋 What the Unpaywall Scraper does

🔍 Keyword search. Free-text search for papers.
🆔 DOI lookup. Search by specific DOI.
📄 Open access filter. Return only papers with free PDFs.

💡 Why it matters: finding free legal versions of paywalled papers means checking multiple repositories. This Actor queries Unpaywall's index and returns direct PDF links when available.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon.

⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
`query`	string	`""`	Keyword search or DOI.
`maxItems`	integer	`10`	Max papers.
`is_oa`	boolean	`false`	Open access papers only.

Example: open-access AI papers.

{ "query": "large language models", "is_oa": true, "maxItems": 50 }

📊 Output

🧾 Schema

Field	Type	Example
📝 `title`	string	`"Attention Is All You Need"`
👤 `authors`	array	`["Vaswani et al."]`
🔗 `doi`	string	`"10.5555/3295222.3295349"`
📄 `oaPdfUrl`	string \| null	`"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762"`
✅ `isOpenAccess`	boolean	`true`
📅 `publishedDate`	string	`"2017"`
🏛️ `journal`	string	`"NeurIPS"`
🔗 `url`	string	`"https://doi.org/10.5555/..."`
🕒 `scrapedAt`	ISO 8601	`"2026-04-16T00:00:00.000Z"`

📦 Sample records

✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
📄	Open access PDF links. Direct URLs to free legal versions.
🔍	Keyword + DOI search. Find papers by topic or identifier.
✅	OA filter. Return only freely accessible papers.
📚	30M+ papers indexed. Broad scholarly coverage.
⚡	Fast. Results in seconds.
🚫	No API key. Uses public Unpaywall data.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	OA links	Coverage	Setup
⭐ Unpaywall Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit	Yes	30M+ papers	⚡ 2 min
Unpaywall browser extension	Free	Yes	Same	Per paper
Unpaywall API	Free with email	Yes	Same	⏳ API setup
Manual repository search	Free	Sometimes	Varies	🕒 Hours

🚀 How to use

📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit.
🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Unpaywall Scraper page.
🎯 Set input. Enter keywords or DOIs, toggle OA filter.
🚀 Run it. Click Start.
📥 Download. Grab results in the Dataset tab.

💼 Business use cases

📚 Research & Libraries

Find free versions of paywalled papers
Build OA reading lists
Enrich institutional repositories
Support open access mandates

📊 Academic Analytics

Track OA availability by field
Analyze publisher OA rates
Build open access dashboards
Monitor repository coverage

🔌 Automating Unpaywall Scraper

🟢 Node.js. apify-client NPM package.
🐍 Python. apify-client PyPI package.
📚 Apify API docs.

❓ FAQ

🔌 Integrate with any app

Make - Zapier - Slack - Airbyte - GitHub - Google Drive

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💡 Browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper or report an issue.

⚠️ Disclaimer: Independent tool, not affiliated with Unpaywall or Our Research. Only publicly available open-access metadata is collected.

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