Unpaywall Open Access Scraper

Find free, legal, full-text PDFs for any research paper. This actor queries the Unpaywall database of 30M+ open-access articles and returns the best free PDF / landing-page URL, the open-access status, license, journal, publisher and authors for any DOI — or for works matched by a title/keyword search.

No API key. No login. Datacenter-proxy friendly (clean public JSON API). You only provide a contact email, which Unpaywall requires for attribution.

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What it does

• 🔓 Resolve DOIs → free full text. Give it a list of DOIs, get back the best open-access PDF URL for each.
• 🔎 Search by title / keyword. Don't have the DOI? Search and resolve in one pass.
• 🧾 Rich metadata. Title, year, journal, publisher, genre, OA status, license, version, host type, number of OA locations, and authors.
• ⚡ Fast & cheap. Lightweight HTTP, 512 MB, no browser, no residential proxy.

Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	select	dois (resolve a DOI list) or search (title/keyword). Default dois.
dois	array	DOIs to resolve, e.g. ["10.1038/nature12373"].
queries	array	Title/keyword queries to search, e.g. ["crispr gene editing"].
email	string	Contact email required by Unpaywall (placeholder domains like example.com are rejected).
maxItems	integer	Max records to return (default 100, max 1000).

Example input

{
  "mode": "dois",
  "dois": ["10.1038/nature12373", "10.1126/science.1259855"],
  "email": "you@your-org.edu",
  "maxItems": 100
}

Output

Each item:

{
  "doi": "10.1038/nature12373",
  "title": "Nanometre-scale thermometry in a living cell",
  "genre": "journal-article",
  "journal": "Nature",
  "publisher": "Springer Science and Business Media LLC",
  "year": 2013,
  "published_date": "2013-07-30",
  "is_oa": true,
  "oa_status": "green",
  "has_repository_copy": true,
  "best_oa_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.1068",
  "best_oa_pdf": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.1068",
  "best_oa_host_type": "repository",
  "best_oa_license": "cc-by",
  "best_oa_version": "submittedVersion",
  "oa_locations_count": 3,
  "authors": ["G. Kucsko", "P. C. Maurer", "N. Y. Yao"],
  "source": "unpaywall",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-20T06:00:00Z"
}

oa_status is one of gold, green, bronze, hybrid or closed. DOIs unknown to Unpaywall (HTTP 404) are silently skipped.

Pricing

Runs on the low-compute model — roughly $0.5 per 1,000 records depending on your plan. A DOI lookup is a single lightweight API call, so large batches stay cheap and fast.

Use cases

• Open-access discovery — bulk-check which papers in a reference list are free to read.
• Research — resolve hundreds of DOIs to OA status and links in one run.
• Legal PDF finding — surface author-deposited and repository copies, never pirated ones.
• Library tools — enrich catalogs with OA links, licenses and versions.

Comparison

	This actor	Manual Unpaywall lookups	Browser scrapers
API key needed	No (email only)	No	Often
Bulk DOIs	✅	❌ one at a time	⚠️ slow
Structured JSON	✅	⚠️	⚠️
License + OA status	✅	✅	❌
Proxy cost	Datacenter (cheap)	—	Residential (pricey)

Related actors

• Crossref Scraper
• OpenAlex Scraper
• ORCID Scraper
• arXiv Scraper

Keywords

unpaywall, open access, DOI, free PDF, full text, scholarly, academic papers, research, OA status, license, literature review, crossref, openalex, orcid, arxiv, open science, green OA, gold OA, legal PDF finder

Notes

Data is provided by the Unpaywall / OpenAlex project. Please respect their terms and use a real contact email.