A Game-Changing Chrome Extension to Unlock Access to Academic Papers

Good tool to get notified when an scientific article or ebook is available through campus licences or when an Open Access version is available. If threre is no e-version available, interlibrary loan is offered.

Our university students, faculty, and staff have given us (KSU Libraries) positive feedback on Lean Library. We have noticed our e-resources usage increase as well.

Lean Library is an excellent tool and has enhanced the research library experience for our students. Its integration into our Library and the easy extension download provides our user with a powerful time-saver research tool. We highly recommend it to our students and researchers looking to streamline their workflow and quickly connect to the valuable content in our library's collection.

Fantastic tool, super helpful for finding papers- I wish the university signposted this better!

Lean Library is a must-have tool for any student or researcher who frequently uses academic resources online. It saves time, increases access to materials, and ensures you're getting the most out of your library’s services

Lean Library has been an absolute game-changer for me! As a student, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), accessing academic resources was never easier. Especially, if I compare it to my Bachelor's when I didn't have this extension. Lean Library has literally saved me countless hours of frustration by connecting me to scholarly articles, e-books, and journals that I needed for my essays, papers, and exam prep. I really appreciated the fact that the VU provides this service to its students!

The plugin itself works quite well. The only issue I recently experience is that for instance YouTube is very slow and crashes often when the plugin is active. The browser uses a lot of memory as well then. I ckecked this behaviour with Chrome and Firefox on Windows and Mac. It happens in all situations. So now I have to inactivate the plugin and make it only active when I need it for library access.

Works well to integrate with university library but every time it updates I have to annoyingly re-disable integrations that I do not want on. 5 stars if they ever fix this problem.

It's a great tool for integrating our university library with the ever expanding plethora of ways to access articles and it really helps me do my job. As a downside though, it recently started bugging out Qualtrics where it trying to retrieve an article from the editing pane would then hide the entire page, making Qualtrics unusable. As I'm sure this tool is mostly used by academics, many of whom also use Qualtrics, I would love to see this fixed.

Lean Library is a fantastic tool for serendipitous discovery of library resources and for enhancing the library experience in general. With it's integration with Google Scholar and other academic sites, its a great time saver and accessibility tool that I would recommend any student or researcher who wants to add an additional asset to their research workflow.

I work for the NHS and this saves me money as it directs me to freely available medical papers rather than paywalled ones.

This extension saves me loads of time when searching for academic papers.

Greetings, I'm not able to get in at all.. It tells me that I am successfully logged in, but it does not get redirected to the library. Spent hours figuring it out and still unsuccessful.

In principle it works really well, but it clashes with Mendeley. When I login to Scopus using my University account, Lean Library is conflicting with that account as well. This prevents me from importing references to Mendeley from Scopus and consequently I have to pause the Lean Library extension.

It tells me I have access to an article, and when I click, it takes me back to the paywall article. When I try to log in through lean open access to read the article, I have the option, but what is my login? I cannot for the life of me find anywhere where I created or can view or even create an account or log in. I've sent notifications to both my possible email addresses and received nothing.

It keeps refreshing every 1 second even when I know I have access to the article. I have re-installed it and will update if the problem persists.

Hi there, This was useful for a bit (although it often redirects me back to the same article?? And redirects me to an article when I'm already able to access the one that I'm currently viewing???) However A few days ago, it started interfering with the Google Translate website. Just now I went through all my extensions, disabling them one by one. I can confirm that this extension is the problem. In Translate, when I am typing, some of the letters don't pass through to the input box. From a bit of testing, it appears that something is causing the input box to lose input focus, approximately at 1Hz. Please check this out! I have no idea why an extension such as this would be doing such a thing with the input focus. Very strange. And, naturally, I cannot use it because Translate is a core part of my daily life. Thanks for this extension all the same, it is a useful concept. Judging by the other reviews, it seems that the code is not written well, cleanly, and/or it is badly designed because the kind of bugs people are mentioning just don't really align with a piece of software that is simply meant to provide access to academic papers! So, please go back and refactor the code, ensure that it isn't doing unnecessary functions, whatever whatever. I notice that the last update was on 25th July, so being 5 days ago, that would coincide with the beginning of this bug.

I am not sure what happened, but there must have been an update or something, as now there are just too many click and options to choose from. And when searching online odd search results keep popping up on my screen. All very confusing.

It used to be really annoying and refresh every page every second. But since a week or so (when I reinstalled it) it has been performing great.

Cannot access it when I need it. Will show up when I dont 'talk to a librarian'. Previous version was 100,000 fold better.

Strange and frustrating bug where this application keeps refreshing my page/switching me back and forth between pdfs. It might be that it interacts badly with Zotero, in which case I know which I'm keeping!

Occasionally uses nearly 100% GPU for lengthy periods. M1 Max, Monterey 12.5

The pop-up and redirect are often mistimed or useless. For example, when browsing wikipedia on "Maxwell's equations" I don't need a message saying that "full text alternatives exist" with an option to access a textbook on Clifford algebras. Some redirects or log-ins are useless. For example, I have to disable the extension to access "https://authors.aps.org/" without being kicked into a redirect loop when trying to submit a paper for publication! I don't need a proxy to access the paper submission site. A similar issue (minus the redirect loop) occurs when reading open-access or free access articles: I don't need to be logged in to access these, so the redirect / log-in procedure is just a time waste. Finally, there are times when I arrive at a page I SHOULD have access to, and the extension sits there like a useless lump and does nothing, e.g. go to physical review E, click on the first interesting looking paywalled article, click the "pdf" option, and I'm told I don't have access.

If it worked it would be amazing... but it doesn't. Don't waste your time nor storage space on this extention