fastpaper
Fast academic paper search, download & read from 17 sources.
fastpaper is a pre-installed standalone CLI. Before first use, verify it is available: which fastpaper. It is NOT a Python package — do NOT attempt to install via pip.
Source selection by domain
Pick sources based on the user's research domain:
CS / AI / Math / Physics
arxiv— Cornell preprint archive; physics, math, CS, statistics, EE, quantitative biology/finance, economics. search, download, readdblp— CS-focused bibliography index. search
Biomedical / Life sciences
pubmed— NLM index, 35M+ citations, biomedical and life sciences abstracts. searchpmc— NLM full-text archive of peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences literature. search, download, readeuropepmc— Life sciences superset of PMC by EMBL-EBI; adds patents, preprints, clinical guidelines. search, download, readbiorxiv— Life sciences preprints by CSHL. search, download, readmedrxiv— Medical/health science preprints by CSHL. search, download, read
Cross-discipline / Broad coverage
semantic— Allen AI, AI-powered semantic search + citation graph, all disciplines. search, download, readcrossref— DOI registry, metadata queries across all disciplines. searchopenalex— Open index (successor to MS Academic Graph), 200M+ works. searchscholar— Google Scholar, broadest coverage (experimental, rate-limited). search
Open access aggregators
core— Largest global OA aggregator, full text from institutional repos and journals. search, download, readopenaire— EU open science infrastructure, aggregates worldwide OA research. search, download, readdoaj— Directory of quality-reviewed OA journals, all subjects. search, download, readunpaywall— OA link resolver by DOI, finds legal free versions (needs UNPAYWALL_EMAIL). search
Open repositories
zenodo— CERN/OpenAIRE general-purpose repository (datasets, software, papers), all disciplines. search, download, readhal— French national multi-disciplinary open archive by CNRS (some embargo periods). search, download, read
When you have a paper ID or DOI
Auto-detect source and fetch directly:
fastpaper get <DOI|arXiv_ID|PMID|URL>When you need to search
fastpaper search <source> <query>For broad topics, search multiple sources in parallel:
fastpaper search arxiv "transformer attention" --format json &
fastpaper search semantic "transformer attention" --format json &
waitEach process is independent; failures don't affect other sources.
When you need full text or specific sections
fastpaper read <source> <id> # full text
fastpaper read <source> <id> --metadata-only # metadata only
fastpaper read <source> <id> --section <SEC> # extract section
fastpaper read local ./file.pdf # local PDFSections: abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, references, full (default).
When you need to download PDF
fastpaper download <source> <id>Download-capable sources: arxiv, pmc, semantic, biorxiv, medrxiv, europepmc, core, doaj, zenodo, hal, openaire.