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7 Ways How to Download Research Papers for Free

May 2, 2020

This article has been just updated: May 2, 2020

With the average cost of a research paper hovering around $30,

many researchers and other people familiar with the matter are
wondering if there isn’t a better alternative to the current model, in
which publicly funded research is locked behind paywalls put up by
publishers, who don’t add much extra value at all.

Some even argue that the current model is the biggest brake there
is on human progress at the moment. We’re not here to judge
whether that’s true or not. Instead, we’re here to tell you how you
can avoid paywalls and download research papers for free.
That’s right! There are websites below that let you download peer-
reviewed research papers without paying the outrageous fees that
most major publishers like to charge these days.

Even though many of the websites described below are technically

illegal, they are praised by thousands of researchers and
academics around the world, who believe that the services they
offer are not only ethical but also crucial for the betterment of the
whole world. We’ll let you decide what’s right and wrong yourself,
so, without further ado, here are top 7 best ways how to download
research papers for free.

1. Sci-Hub
Launched in 2011 by Kazakhstani graduate student Alexandra
Elbakyan, Sci-Hub is a website that provides access to academic

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papers and articles using educational institution access and its own
cache of downloaded papers and articles.

Sci-Hub mirrors:

http://sci-
hub.se
http://sci-
hub.is/

To say that Sci-Hub is a controversial website would be a serious

understatement. The site has been accused of copyright
infringement on multiple occasions, and it’s currently blocked by
many internet service providers, especially in developed countries.
According to Sci-Hub’s own statistics, there’s a 99 percent chance
that a request for download will be successful, and over 200,000
requests are processed every day.

To download a research paper using Sci-Hub:

1. Go to http://sci-hub.tw.
2. Type the full name, URL, or DOI of the research paper you want
to download.

3. Click the “Open” button.

2. Library Genesis
Library Genesis is a massive database of over 2.7 million books

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and 58 million science magazine files. The site was sued by

Elsevier, one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific,
technical, and medical research papers, in 2015, but nothing has
come out of it yet. At the moment, Library Genesis is blocked by
several internet service providers in the United Kingdom, but the
site remains readily accessible thanks to the existence of a large
number of Library Genesis mirrors.

Library Genesis mirrors:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec
http://libgen.pw
http://libgen.unblocker.cc/
http://libgen.unblockall.org/
https://libgen.unblocker.win/
https://libgen.unblocked.gdn/

To find a book or research paper on Library Genesis:

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1. Go to: http://libgen.io/ (which is the official URL of the site at the

moment).
2. Type your keywords into the search field.
3. Click the “Search!” button.

4. Click on the name of the book or research paper you’re looking

for.
5. Click on any of the available mirrors.

6. Download the book or research paper to your device.

3. Unpaywall
Unpaywall is a massive open database of more than 21 million free
scholarly articles. The articles come from over 50,000 publishers
and content repositories, and you can easily access them using the
Unpaywall browser extension for Chrome.

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To download the extension:

1. Go to: https://unpaywall.org/products/extension.
2. Click the “ADD TO CHROME” button.
3. On the Chrome Web Store page, click “Add to Chrome.”

4. Wait for the extension to install.

The extension works automatically, and it appears every time you

visit a paywalled research paper that’s present in Unpaywall’s open
database. All you have to do is click the green Unpaywall button,
and the paper will instantly appear.

Because Unpaywall points to legal, author-posted

manuscripts that are hosted on university and government
web servers, which are often called Green Open Access
manuscripts, the service it offers is completely legal. In
fact, Unpaywall is integrated into thousands of library
systems, search platforms, and other information products
worldwide, making scholarship more accessible to everyone.

4. Directory of Open Access Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a community-curated
website that lists high quality, peer-reviewed open access journals.
The website launched in 2003 with around 300 journals, and it has
since grown to include over 10,000 open access journals covering

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all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science, and

humanities.

DOAJ is maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access

(IS4OA), which is a not-for-profit charitable organization whose
aim is to provide benefit to the global community of users of
openly accessible research publications and data. IS4OA
believes that wide and open distribution and dissemination of
knowledge will benefit society worldwide.

Just like Unpaywall, DOAJ is completely legal, and the website is

funded by sponsors and publisher and non-publisher members. To
use it to find and download free research papers:

1. Go to: https://doaj.org/.
2. Type your keywords into the search field and press enter.

3. Select the research paper you want to download.

4. Click the “Full Text” button located right above the abstract.

5. Open Access Button

The Open Access Button started when a group of students got tired
of hitting paywalls. To fix the broken system, they launched The

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Open Access Button was launched in November 2013, leveraging

public repositories of research papers to make publicly funded
research accessible to all.

The Open Access Button works much like Unpaywall, with one
major exception. When the Open Access Button discovers that an
article isn’t freely available, it automatically sends a request to the
authors to share it by putting it into a repository.

To use the Open Access Button:

1. Go to: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/open-access-
button/
2. Click the “Add to Chrome” button to install the Open Access
Button browser extension.

3. The next time you can’t access the research you need, simply
click on the Open Access Button to access it.

If you don’t use Google Chrome, you can use the online version of
the Open Access Button, which is accessible at
https://openaccessbutton.org/.

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6. ScienceOpen
ScienceOpen is a professional networking platform for scholars that
offers access to over 40 million research papers in all areas of
science. ScienceOpen was founded in 2013 by Alexander
Grossmann, a physicist and professor of publishing management at
the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, and
Tibor Tscheke, an information scientist, software developer, and
content management specialist. The purpose of Science Open is to
explore new ways to open up information for the scholarly
community, and it’s safe to say that the project has so far achieved
its goal splendidly.

To search research papers using Science open:

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1. Go to: http://about.scienceopen.com/.
2. Click the green “Search” button in the top-right corner.

3. Type your keywords into the search field. Apart from keywords,
you can also search by authors, collections, journals, publishers,
and other.

7. CORE
CORE is an aggregator of open access research published in
research repositories and journals worldwide. Its chief goal is to
support the rights of citizens and the general public to access the
results of research towards which they contributed by paying
taxes, and it achieves it by offering seamless access to millions of
open access research papers.

To find a research paper using CORE:

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1. Go to: https://core.ac.uk/.
2. Type your keywords into the search field.

3. Click the “Search” button.

4. Click the “Get PDF” button to download any research paper you
want.

Conclusion
Before you use any of the above-described top 7 ways how to
download research papers for free, you should remember that
circumventing paywalls put up by publishers is illegal in many
countries around the world. To protect yourself, you should
consider using a VPN (virtual private network) service, which
extends a private network across a public network, enabling you to
send and receive data securely and privately.

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