respf 1.3.1

Download academic papers from Unpaywall, OpenAlex, PubMed, bioRxiv, ArXiv, and more (no LLM)

respf - Research Paper Fetcher

A Python package for downloading academic papers across all research fields (CS, biology, medicine, physics, and more). No LLM calls: only APIs, metadata, and deterministic title matching.

Installation

pip install respf
# or local dev:
cd final && uv venv && uv pip install -e ".[dev]"

Sources

Source	Best for
acl	ACL Anthology (NLP/CL proceedings) — IDs, URLs, titles
acm	ACM Digital Library (10.1145/*, dl.acm.org)
crossref	Journal DOIs via Crossref PDF links in metadata
plos	PLOS open-access journals (10.1371/*)
hal	HAL open archive (hal.science)
osf	OSF preprints
ieee	IEEE Xplore (when stamp PDF is open)
direct_url	Direct PDF URLs, Springer/Nature heuristics
unpaywall	Any DOI with legal open-access PDF
pubmed	Biology / medicine (PMC open access)
biorxiv	bioRxiv & medRxiv preprints
openalex	Cross-disciplinary search & OA links
arxiv	Physics, CS, math preprints
europepmc	Biomedical literature (Europe PMC API)
zenodo	Open research records (10.5281/zenodo.*)
semantic_scholar	DOI/title with openAccessPdf
google_scholar	Fallback PDF discovery
springer, acm, github	Publisher / repo search

Default source order depends on identifier type (DOI tries Unpaywall first; PMID tries PubMed first; titles try OpenAlex before ArXiv).

Usage

CLI

# List sources
respf --list-sources

# How will this identifier be resolved? (no download)
respf --resolve "10.1038/nature12373" --json

# Download by DOI (biology, any field)
respf "10.1038/nature12373"

# Download by PubMed ID
respf "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12345678/"

# Download by title (title similarity verification, no LLM)
respf "Attention Is All You Need"

# Direct PDF URL (e.g. ACL Anthology)
respf "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1074.pdf"

# Explicit sources
respf "10.1101/2020.01.01.123456" --sources unpaywall,biorxiv,openalex

# Citations file with --parse (APA, IEEE, BibTeX, PubMed, PMC, bioRxiv URLs)
respf --file citations.txt --parse --dir ./papers

# Metadata without download (OpenAlex / Unpaywall)
respf --info "10.1038/nature12373" --json

# Dry-run: routing + metadata, no PDF
respf --dry-run "10.1038/nature12373" --json

# Batch with 4 parallel workers
respf --file citations.txt --parse --workers 4

# Agent capability manifest (JSON)
respf --capabilities

Agent / programmatic API

Structured JSON-friendly responses with resolved, error_code, and routing metadata.

from respf import (
    ResearchPaperDownloader,
    agent_capabilities,
    agent_fetch,
    agent_lookup,
    agent_resolve,
    download_paper,
    resolve_identifier,
    list_sources,
    parse_identifier,
)

# Agent session bootstrap
print(agent_capabilities())

# Discover sources
print(list_sources())

# Route before downloading (agents)
routing = resolve_identifier("10.1038/nature12373")
# {"kind": "doi", "recommended_sources": ["direct_url", "unpaywall", ...], ...}

downloader = ResearchPaperDownloader(download_dir="papers")
result = downloader.download_paper("10.1038/nature12373")
# result["success"], result["results"][0]["filepath"], result["resolved"]

info = downloader.get_paper_info("10.1038/nature12373")  # no PDF download

# Or agent helpers (stable JSON shapes)
agent_lookup("10.1038/nature12373")
agent_fetch("10.1038/nature12373", dry_run=True)

Environment (optional)

Variable	Purpose
UNPAYWALL_EMAIL	Polite pool email for Unpaywall API
OPENALEX_EMAIL	Polite pool for OpenAlex
SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY	Higher rate limits for Semantic Scholar

Accuracy (no LLM)

• Identifier routing: DOI, PMID, PMC, ArXiv, bioRxiv, and direct PDF URLs go to the right source first.
• Title search: difflib similarity; downloads rejected if best match score < 0.62 (ArXiv/OpenAlex/Semantic Scholar).
• PDF verification: Every download checked for %PDF magic bytes and minimum size.

PDF Summarization

pip install respf[summarize]
respf --summarize --dir ./papers

License

MIT