Finding information

You can always request a copy directly from the author (if you can find the e-mail address); often not the fastest way, but traditionally a well-used route to get PDFs.

Many researchers have joined one or more social networks for scientists. And many make their PDFs available inside these networks for download or offer the option to request it.

ResearchGate, Academia and Mendeley are social networking sites for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. Please keep in mind the copyright-rules of these networks.

Unpaywall is a free web-browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that indexes papers from more than 5,000 repositories worldwide, including preprint servers and institutional databases. Get full-text of more than 10 million legal, Open Access articles while you browse.

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Open Access Button is a web bookmarklet that offers free legal research articles and data delivered instantly or automatically requested from authors. You can do this from the website, or install a browser extension.

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Kopernio is a browser plugin that finds the best available PDF of academic articles while you browse. Behind the scenes, Kopernio will search open databases and (where possible) your university’s subscriptions.

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is a is a multi-disciplinary search engine to academic web resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. BASE facilitates effective and targeted searches and retrieves high quality, academically relevant results. Other than search engines like Google or Bing BASE searches the deep web as well. The sources which are included in BASE are selected and reviewed.

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OAPEN is an initiative in Open Access publishing for peer reviewed academic books in the humanities and social sciences.

Many institutional repositories contain author versions / pre-prints of scientific articles. Examples:

• UM Research Publications
• NARCIS, the gateway to scholarly information in the Netherlands
• The Directory of Open Access Repositories
• Digital Commons Network
• RePEc, a decentralised bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, etc. in the field of economics
• SSRN encourages the early distribution of Social Sciences research results by reviewing and distributing submitted abstracts and full text papers from scholars around the world

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.

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With the Google Scholar button added to your browser, you get easy access to Google Scholar from any web page. Find full text on the web or in your university library. Select the title of the paper on the page you’re reading, and click the Scholar button to find it.

For CHROME | Firefox – https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/google-scholar-button/

You can request copies of articles via the UM Library Interlibrary loan service.

Use the hashtag #icanhazpdf together with a link to the requested publication; if somebody has access, they can/will send you the PDF.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23icanhazpdf