Firefox extension to skip academic journals' "enhanced" PDF viewers to direct PDF downloads.
Get the add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/pdf-direct/.
| With Extension | Without Extension |
|---|---|
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The extension works with major academic publishers:
- ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
- ACS (American Chemical Society)
- Cambridge University Press
- Elsevier (ScienceDirect)
- IEEE
- JSTOR
- Nature Publishing Group
- Oxford University Press
- PLOS
- PNAS
- Royal Society Publishing
- Sage Publications
- Science
- Springer Nature
- Taylor & Francis
- Wiley
The extension automatically works with:
- Direct publisher websites (e.g.,
journals.sagepub.com) - Some OCLC-hosted proxy URLs under
*.oclc.org(e.g.,journals-sagepub-com.university.idm.oclc.org)
Institution proxy URLs vary a lot, so support cannot be inferred generically. If your library proxy is not handled, please open an issue with an example URL.
The extension intercepts requests to academic journal "enhanced" PDF viewers and redirects them to direct PDF downloads by converting:
/doi/reader/→/doi/pdf//doi/epdf/→/doi/pdf//doi/epub/→/doi/pdf/
This works across direct publisher domains and some proxy-hosted URLs.
MIT
Submit an issue if you want me to add a publisher / feature / squash a bug.
Development requirements:
web-ext(npm install -g web-ext)ghCLI (brew install gh)jq(brew install jq)
Build and publish extension
- Download/clone https://github.com/mvuorre/pdf-direct
- Test extension manually:
make test - Lint extension:
make lint - Increment version in
manifest.json - Create release:
make release - Sign & submit extension:
make sign(but note this requires private keys)
- Icons: Pdf icons created by El-Faza Stuff - Flaticon
- A bunch of AI coding tools

