These are some of the websites that can be used to download journal articles. Some are legal, some are in the grey area.

Sci-Hub

There is an article I  wrote a while ago about the science-hub founder, read it here.

At Sci-Hub, researchers, students, and other academics donate their institutional login to Sci-Hub, and when you search for a paper they download it through that account. After the articles have been downloaded they store a copy of them on their own servers. You can basically download 99% of all scientific articles and papers on Sci-Hub, but it’s decidedly in the grey area legally. Just enter the DOI to download the papers you need for free.

In case that link to Sci-Hub doesn’t work, try these new Sci-Hub links:

https://sci-hub.se/

https://sci-hub.ee/

Check the Wikipedia page for the newest links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Library Genesis

Library Genesis is a database of over 2 million (yes, million) papers, articles, entire journals, and non-fiction books. They also have comics, fiction books, and books in many nonEnglish languages. To download research papers at Library Genesis, copy-paste the paper title to the search box and ensure you select “Scientific Articles” before you click search.

Alternative links:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec
http://libgen.pw
http://libgen.is

How to download ebooks from Library Genesis (libgen) for free

Electronic Library

The electronic library is a store for free electronic books and papers. Download link: https://b-ok.cc/

Unpaywall

Unpaywall is a website built by Impactstory, a nonprofit working to make science more open and reusable online. They are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. What they do is gather all the articles they can from all the open-access repositories on the internet. These are papers that have been provided by the authors or publishers for free, and thus Unpaywall is completely legal. They say they have about 50-85% of all scientific articles available in their archive. Works with Chrome or Firefox.

Open Access Button

The Open Access Button does something very similar to Unpaywall, with some major differences. They search thousands of public repositories, and if the article is not in any of them they send a request to the author to make the paper publicly available with them. The more people try to find an article through them, the more requests an author gets. You can search for articles/papers directly from their page, or download their browser extension.

Bonus; Useful Chrome Extensions

  1. Get around paywalls

If you’re like me you probably read a lot of articles online, and as more and more news websites are adding paywalls this can get quite annoying.
This handy Chrome Extension gets rid of a bunch of different paywalls, letting you read the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times and Bloomberg without annoyance. It’s not available on the Google Chrome Extensions Store, so you’ll have to install it manually (instructions are in the link). Totally worth it, though.
Download here

  1. Block Ads: uBlock Origin

This is the best ad blocker I’ve found. I know the ethics of ad-blocking can be questioned, but I simply don’t want to be annoyed while browsing the internet. Is that too much to ask?
Download here

  1. Full Page Screen Capture

Hiding under this generic name is the absolute best screen capture extension for Chrome I’ve ever seen. It does exactly what it says, without trying to sell you anything or annoy you. It adds a little button to your menu bar, click it to take a screenshot of the entire page. Useful for printing a website or sending an article to someone.
Download here

  1. Sci-Hub Links

This one’s probably the furthest along on the moral grayscale, what it does is turn any DOI link on the internet into a link to the paper on Sci-Hub, letting you download the paper for free.
Download here

oa.mg

Search, read and download over 200 million research papers for free: oa.mg

OA.mg aims to make research more accessible and discoverable by providing direct download links to millions of research papers. Its prime mission is to help everyone become more productive at every stage of their academic work — from research to bibliography generation. By aggregating and combining all Open Access databases, they are able to guide you to the latest open access research as well as the research behind paywalls. If there isn’t a direct link, they’ll help you find a way to download it. 

References:

1. The Citationsy Blog

2.https://www.eeducationgroup.com/the-pirate-bay-of-science/

 

 

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