PDF Direct

Firefox extension to skip academic journals' "enhanced" PDF viewers to direct PDF downloads.

Install

Get the add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/pdf-direct/.

Example

With Extension	Without Extension

Supported Publishers

The extension works with major academic publishers and their university proxy versions:

• American Chemical Society (ACS)
• Cambridge University Press
• Elsevier (ScienceDirect)
• IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
• JSTOR (Academic archives)
• Nature Publishing Group
• Oxford University Press
• PLOS (Public Library of Science)
• PNAS
• Royal Society Publishing
• Sage Publications
• Springer Nature
• Taylor & Francis
• Wiley

The extension automatically works with:

• Direct publisher websites (e.g., journals.sagepub.com)
• OCLC WorldCat proxies (e.g., journals-sagepub-com.university.idm.oclc.org)

How It Works

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 both direct publisher domains and proxy services.

License

MIT

Contributing and development

Submit an issue if you want me to add a publisher / feature / squash a bug.

Development requirements:

• web-ext (npm install -g web-ext)
• gh CLI (brew install gh)
• jq (brew install jq)

Build and publish extension

1. Download/clone https://github.com/mvuorre/pdf-direct
2. Test extension manually: make test
3. Lint extension: make lint
4. Increment version in manifest.json
5. Create release: make release
6. Sign & submit extension: make sign (but note this requires private keys)

Credits

• Icons: Pdf icons created by El-Faza Stuff - Flaticon
• A bunch of AI coding tools