Unpaywall

journals/studies behind an actual paywall are not free to access with this extension. The papers that show up with a green lock with this extension are already free and open access. Tried over 20 papers across several different providers. This extension acts like a download button for ALREADY open access and free papers and does not bypass a paywall. Not sure what the point of this extension is!

Doesn't work. Shows the green lock, but clicking on it does nothing, just asks for an account to that publisher's platform. Now if I had that we wouldn't be here would we.

It's Incredibly terrible...

total garbage. Sci hub is way better

doesn't work on wsj

I am doing research on Roe V Wade. This did not get me past ANY paywall. NOT ONE. Not from medical journals, not from newspapers, not from Substack or Medium, I hit a paywall for every single article and journal I needed access to. Complete waste of time

Works only on articles that are already free.

Not working.

Doesn't work.

This extension does NOTHING on sites like New York Times, or Washington Post that all use paywalls.

not working.

It just sends you to pdfs

Does not work on news articles. Useless. Don't care for research papers which are ALREADY FREE.

looks like no longer work in 2022

Worked once....for a free article out of 20 articles I tried, redundant.

Doesn't work on New York Times, so it's pointless

does not work with vz.lt

Doesn't work....

Not working. Nothing shows.

It doesn't work; it doesn't show at all.

Didn't work for me.

Won't work on vast majority of articles unless they're already open-access, which defeats the purpose of this extension. Basically does little more than being a PDF downloader.

i did research and it doesn't work at all, it have paywall tho but i did not see the lock icon the side of my desktop

It Didn't work! . I tried it on different sites and it didn't work on any.

I downloaded to try to unlock Wall Street Journal. Doesn't work. Also doesn't work on any psychology articles I looked for.

Not working for nytimes.com

A simple Google Scholar search revealed free instances of a semi-popular article referenced in a tech news outlet that the extension did not locate. This extension is not worth downloading.

I searched Pubmed for a topic I'm interested in and looked at the first nine papers. Two had the fulltext available directly from the link, so Unpaywall wasn't necessary (although it did light up green). Unpaywall was grey for the remaining seven papers. Seems pretty redundant, from this admittedly not-very-scientific sample.

Quite useless, better to uninstall, as all addons have some risk of some web pages no longer working as expected? Sci-Hub and Pidantuan are more useful. If you can't find something at Sci-Hub, ask for it at Pidantuan and then it should become available at Sci-Hub. If anyone has better tips, please mention it in your Review. THANKS!

it doesnt work.IDK

**Note its for scientific journals not mainsteam media like Wall Street Journal.** The extension name could perhaps be a little less generic. As for use in journals I typically access - this works, rarely. To concur with some of the feedback here - only occasionally does it procide access to a pdf, sometimes it fails when a pdf is available almost at the top of a google search, sometimes a bit more digging is required. Nice idea though.

It's kind of useful, but sometimes it fails to detect the available full versions of articles. I mainly spend my time on Pubmed and sometimes there's a paper there with a clear link to the full free version of the article on Pubmed central, but Unpaywall still says that there is no free full version of this paper available. When the Unpaywall padlock icon is open and green - yes it is useful to be able to just click it and go directly to the free full version. But when the padlock is grey and locked, I still do my own search for a free version (often successfully), but I thought that this searching on my own was what this extension was supposed to save me time on.

It doesn't work for all paywalled articles. If you're lucky you'll get some of them. Still worth a try if you're a student and looking for secondary sources for your assignment or paper.

It generally works nicely and is very convenient! However, Google Scholar can often find papers not found by this extension.

Doesn't check for all free papers Often Google Scholar + ResearchGate yields better results for free legal papers.