We always show you the free version of a paper (when it exists)

Publicly funded research locked behind $30-per-article paywalls. It's absurd but it's still the norm. If you're not at a well-funded university, huge chunks of the literature are simply invisible to you.

We can't fix the publishing industry overnight, but we can make sure you find the free version when one exists. And it usually does — author preprints, PubMed Central deposits, institutional repositories, accepted manuscripts on personal sites. These are all legal and legitimate. We just make them easy to find.

How it works in practice

• Search results show an OA badge whenever a free version exists.
• The PDF link takes you to the open copy, not the paywall.
• We surface preprints and accepted manuscripts alongside the journal version.
• We check PMC, Europe PMC, DOAJ, and institutional repositories to find the best free copy.
• If no free version exists, we'll tell you — but we check thoroughly before giving up.

Why we care about this

A researcher in Lagos and a researcher in London should be able to read the same papers. That's not idealism — it's the basic requirement for reproducible science. Can't replicate an experiment if you can't read how it was done. Can't check statistics if you can't see the methods section.

Every time we surface a free copy that someone would otherwise have hit a paywall for, that's one less barrier to someone doing good work. We think scholarly communication should be open, and we're building our platform to move in that direction.