📚 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: 2026-04-23 · 📚 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

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📋 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.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon.

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⚙️ 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 }

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📊 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

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✨ 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.

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📈 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

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🚀 How to use

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

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💼 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

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to run this actor?

No. You can start right now on the free Apify plan, which includes $5 in free monthly credit. That is enough to run this actor several times and explore the output before committing to anything. Paid plans unlock higher limits, more concurrent runs, and larger datasets. Create a free Apify account here to get started.

🚨 What happens if my run fails or returns no results?

Failed runs are not charged. If the source site changes, proxies get rate-limited, or a specific input matches nothing, re-run the actor or open our contact form and we will investigate. You can also check the run log in the Apify console to see why the run stopped.

📏 How many items can I scrape per run?

Free users are limited to 10 items per run so you can preview the output and confirm the actor works for your use case. Paid users can raise maxItems up to 1,000,000 per run. Upgrade here if you need full scale.

🕒 How fresh is the data?

Every run fetches live data at the moment of execution. There is no cache or delay: the records you get reflect what the source returned at that moment. Schedule the actor to maintain a rolling snapshot of the data you need.

🧑‍💻 Can I call this actor from my own code?

Yes. Apify exposes every actor as a REST endpoint and ships first-class SDKs for Node.js and Python. You can start a run, read the dataset, and handle webhooks from your own app in a few lines. All you need is your Apify API token.

📤 How do I export the data?

Every Apify dataset can be downloaded in one click from the console as CSV, JSON, JSONL, Excel, HTML, XML, or RSS. You can also pull results programmatically via the Apify API or stream them into BigQuery, S3, and other destinations through built-in integrations.

📅 Can I schedule the actor to run automatically?

Yes. Use the Apify scheduler to run the actor on any cadence, from hourly to monthly. Results are saved to your dataset and can be delivered to webhooks, email, Slack, cloud storage, or automation tools such as Zapier and Make.

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🔌 Automating Unpaywall Scraper

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

🔌 Integrate with any app

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

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• 🤖 Hugging Face Model Scraper - AI models
• 📊 FRED Scraper - Economic data

💡 Browse the complete ParseForge collection.

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

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