How to bypass paywalls

Paywalls are becoming more and more of a burden. They effectively lock knowledge behind a pay-to-read system.

Below are some links that can sometimes help you bypass paywalls. Not all of them work in every case, though, so sometimes it’s worth trying out a few of them.

For news media

• Adding 12ft.io/ to the beginning of a URL will sometimes allow you to read or share an article without triggering the paywall. You can also visit the website directly and enter a URL.

• Copy the URL of the page you’re trying to view and put it into archive.is. It’s possible that the crawler for this site has previously archived the page you’re trying to view, without a paywall.

For Medium

Tired of Medium articles that are locked behind a log-in or a paywall? Try Scribe, an alternate front-end that allows you to replace medium.com with scribe.rip to access articles.

For scholarly research

• Unpaywall is an open database of over 50 million free scholarly articles. They also offer a free browser extension that automatically skips the paywall when it finds a matching unpaywalled equivalent.

• sci-hub’s goal is to provide free and unrestricted access to all scientific knowledge. Its database has over 88 million free research articles and books. There is an unofficial (?) browser extension you can install here.