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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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ParseForge

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5 days ago

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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: 2026-04-23 · 📚 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

📋 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

🌟 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:

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🔌 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

🔗 Recommended Actors

📚 Semantic Scholar Scraper - Academic paper metadata
📚 ArXiv Citation Scraper - Citation networks
🏥 ClinicalTrials.gov Scraper - Clinical trials
🤖 Hugging Face Model Scraper - AI models
📊 FRED Scraper - Economic data

💡 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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