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Open-access PDFs

Keeping a paper's PDF is core to ALMa. This plugin supplies the legal sources it searches when you tap a paper's PDF icon and it has no file yet. Until you switch it on, ALMa looks nowhere — it only serves files it already has, or ones you attach yourself.

Turn it on

  1. Settings → Plugins → Open-access PDFs, switch it on.
  2. (Recommended) Add a contact email in Settings → Connections. Unpaywall, one of the best sources, only answers requests that carry one; without it the plugin card says so and that source sits out.

There is nothing else to configure, and no connection test: none of the sources needs an account.

What it tries, in order

arXiv, PubMed Central, OpenAlex, Unpaywall, Crossref, the publisher's own page, and Semantic Scholar. ALMa stops at the first file whose text names the paper — a download that turns out to be a different article, or a landing page dressed as a PDF, is discarded and the next source is tried.

Every attempt is an operation you can follow in Activity, step by step ("Asking Unpaywall…"), and the tab that opens when you tap the icon lists what each source answered.

Advanced: OpenAlex's cached PDFs

Under Show advanced controls, Use OpenAlex's cached PDFs adds OpenAlex's own copies of open-access papers as a last resort, for when a publisher blocks the download. Each PDF costs $0.01 of your OpenAlex budget and needs an OpenAlex API key, so it is off unless you ask for it.

When everything here fails

The tab tells you what each source answered and offers Try again or Attach a PDF…. It never searches again on its own.

If you also switch on Shadow libraries, those addresses are tried after every source on this page has failed — never before.

  • Reading PDFs — opening, attaching and importing PDFs, and reading them on your phone
  • Plugins — what is true of every plugin