paper-fetcher

What This Skill Does

The paper-fetcher skill serves as an automated bridge between academic research interests and digital storage. By leveraging Sci-Hub's infrastructure, this agent simplifies the labor-intensive process of locating, downloading, and cataloging scholarly articles. When provided with a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), the skill autonomously navigates the Sci-Hub portal, handles the request, and captures the corresponding PDF file. Files are systematically stored within the local research/papers/ directory, employing a standardized naming convention (e.g., paper_[formatted_doi].pdf) that ensures consistency and easy retrieval. This utility is designed to integrate seamlessly into a researcher's workflow, eliminating the manual friction associated with multi-step file management.

Installation

To integrate the paper-fetcher skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw command-line interface. Ensure you have the necessary permissions for directory creation and network connectivity. Execute the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/biohackerrrrrr/paper-fetcher

Once installed, the agent will monitor for DOI strings and respond accordingly whenever it identifies valid citation identifiers.

Use Cases

This skill is tailored for researchers, students, and analysts who frequently interact with academic literature. Common use cases include:

• Automating Literature Reviews: Quickly pulling a batch of papers identified from a bibliography.
• Building a Knowledge Base: Aggregating seminal papers into an Obsidian-synced folder for offline reference.
• Streamlining Research Automation: Integrating paper retrieval into broader research loops where an AI agent first finds a relevant DOI and then fetches the full text automatically.
• Centralization: Converting disparate web links into a local, searchable archive of PDFs.

Example Prompts

1. "Please fetch this paper for me: 10.1038/s41586-2023-06789-0"
2. "I need the following articles for my project, can you download them? 10.1016/j.cell.2023.01.001 and 10.1126/science.abc1234"
3. "Can you grab the paper on epitalon located at https://doi.org/10.1007/s12603-011-0032-7?"

Tips & Limitations

The paper-fetcher is highly efficient but depends on the availability of the target material on the utilized backend. If an article is not archived on Sci-Hub, the agent will alert you to perform a manual search. To maximize success, ensure the DOIs provided are complete. While the tool handles both raw DOIs and full URL-encoded links, verifying the input string helps avoid parsing errors. For large batch fetches, the agent processes requests sequentially, so please allow a moment for the system to confirm each successful download. Always verify the resulting file path in your research/papers/ directory to ensure local indexing is maintained.