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Find a paper’s PDF

Paste a DOI or a paper title and get legal open-access PDF links in seconds — sourced from OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar. When no open copy exists, we say so and point you to the next-best route.

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Searches OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar — we only link to legal open-access copies. Limited to 10 lookups per minute.

When to use this

Use this when you have a citation but not the paper: a DOI from a reference list, a title from a tweet or a talk, or an entry in your screening spreadsheet. The finder resolves DOIs directly and matches titles against 250M+ indexed works, then surfaces the open-access PDF location when one exists. It is fastest for the common cases — preprints, post-2000 papers in fields with strong repository cultures (physics, computer science, biomedicine), and anything published in a gold OA journal. It is also honest: when there is no legal open copy, it tells you instead of dead-ending you on a landing page, because the right next step (library proxy, inter-library loan, emailing the author) depends on knowing that.

What it searches

  • OpenAlex — the open successor to Microsoft Academic Graph, covering 250M+ works.
  • Semantic Scholar — used as an automatic fallback and enrichment source.
  • DOI lookups resolve exactly; title queries return the top 3 matches.
  • Only legal open-access locations are linked — no Sci-Hub or shadow libraries.

Common mistakes

  • Searching with an abbreviated or paraphrased title — paste an exact, longer chunk of the real title for better matching.
  • Giving up when no OA copy exists: the DOI link through your campus network often unlocks the publisher version.
  • Assuming a missing PDF means the paper doesn’t exist — very recent papers can lag in the indexes by days or weeks.

Frequently asked questions

Where do the PDF links come from?
From the open-access location indexed by OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar — typically the publisher’s own OA copy, or a legitimate repository version (arXiv, PubMed Central, university repositories). These are legal copies that the authors or publishers made openly available; this tool never links to pirate libraries.
Why can’t it find a PDF for my paper?
Roughly half of scholarly papers have no open-access copy at all — they live behind the publisher paywall. In that case use the DOI link through your university network or library proxy, ask your library for an inter-library loan, check the authors’ homepages, or email the corresponding author (sharing the accepted manuscript privately is almost always permitted).
What is the difference between gold, green and hybrid open access?
Gold OA: the journal itself publishes the final article openly (often after an article processing charge). Green OA: the paywalled article has a self-archived copy — usually the accepted manuscript — in a repository. Hybrid: a subscription journal where individual articles were made open. For reading purposes they are equivalent: a legal free copy.

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