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Lean Library

A library-approved tool to unlock access to academic papers.

Users200KCurrent public install base
Rating3.4Store average score
Reviews142Public review volume
Manifest versionV3Extension platform version
7-day growth0Net users gained this week
7-day growth rate0%Relative weekly velocity
Preview

Lean Library Media preview

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Trend

User growth trend

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User Growth Over Time

200K200K200K200K200K2026年7月15日2026年7月18日2026年7月21日Latest: 200K
Rating trend

7-day rating trend

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7-day rating change

Start
3.43
Latest
3.43
7-day rating change
0.00
3.333.383.433.483.532026年7月15日2026年7月18日2026年7月21日Latest: 3.43
2026年7月15日2026年7月21日
Growth overview

Daily, weekly, and monthly growth

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1-day growthFlat
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7-day growthFlat
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Technical snapshot

Version, languages, and crawl freshness

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Version2026.5.0
ManifestV3
Size11.91MiB
Languages1English
Published
Store updated
Last crawled
English
Overview

Product summary

Review the store description, core capabilities, and common use cases.

Providing an uninterrupted research rhythm

Lean Library is a free end-to-end research tool that brings your library’s services and resources directly into your research workflow, no matter where you start your research. Whether you are discovering and accessing academic content or saving references, Lean Library puts your library right at the heart of every research journey. Instantly and legally unlock millions of academic articles, eBooks, and open access content, avoid paywalls, and receive customised guidance from your library. Save references, highlight and annotate content, get journal alerts, and build information literacy skills with article retraction alerts and trust ratings—all from within your browser.

Ready to start using Lean Library?

Install the extension, select your institution and begin researching! Even if you aren’t

affiliated with an institution, you can still get quick and seamless redirection to open access materials absolutely free by downloading the extension and selecting Lean Library Open as your library.

Please note, the Lean Library browser extension works together with Lean Library

Reviews

Recent review snapshot

Inspect the latest comments and rating distribution.

Store average score3.4Chrome Web Store aggregate rating, including ratings without synced review text
Synced text average3.1Average computed only from synced review bodies below
Reviews with text103Synced review bodies
Total ratings / reviews142Chrome Web Store public rating/review count

Store average score: 3.4. The bars below are calculated from synced review text only, so they may be empty for extensions that have public ratings but no synced comments yet.

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19
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29
Sandipan Das2020年3月29日
1

Accessing to uni library resources are good. However, at some point it blocks out your regular internet. Meaning you can't load pages using your browser, at least in chrome. I am using Ubuntu 18.04 with Chrome.

Language en
Míriam R. García2020年3月23日
1

It is a great idea, unfortunately if I activate this extension with Chromium (linux computer), internet stops working on chromium at some point. The solution is either to reinitilize chormium or stop the extension. Quite unfortunately because it took me a long time to find the problem with my internet conection.

Language en
Kate2020年3月17日
5

Works remarkably well! I always get instant access to my university hospital's library via this extension. Works as intended.

Language en
3 helpful · 0 not helpful
Rahul Jajodia2020年2月5日
5

We have access to a lot of journals from our university using eduroam. Been using this to access papers from home recently and its a very easy process. Makes life easier. Will hold on a better review until i use it more

Language en
1 helpful · 0 not helpful
Ben Bartlett2020年1月28日
1

I hate that I am forced to use this extension for remote library access. It intermittently slows my internet speeds to unusable levels (with sites that should not go through a proxy, such as Twitter, taking over 60 seconds to load) and increases CPU and memory impact of Chrome significantly.

Language en
1 helpful · 0 not helpful
Andrey Fedorov2020年1月9日
2

It's a very strange extension. First, there is no way to selectively use it for specific pages. It often applies itself to pages when not needed, messing up the functionality of those pages. Then I need to go to Extensions settings to manually disable it altogether. Second, it does not work reliably. There are pages where it activates, I see the icon is green, but the content is still not available, or magazine web site still shows "sign in" and "subscribe" links. I am on the verge to remove it completely, but keeping just in case as a last resort.

Language en
1 helpful · 0 not helpful
Roger Bosman2019年11月20日
3

At the minimum it needs a blacklist for websites, the popup is showing even on pages like Wikipedia. However, a way better option would be to be able to disable the popup, and show the extension as "access available" in another color when the popup would normally show. The website actually describes this feature, but says the institution has control over this? Why? Just let me supress the popups please!

Language en
1 helpful · 0 not helpful
René Oostdijk2019年11月8日
5

Bijzonder handige browser-extensie. Stuurt je automatisch naar de full-text versie van een artikel of biedt je de mogelijkheid om het aan te vragen via de bibliotheek van je hogeschool of universiteit.

Language nl
3 helpful · 0 not helpful
Mark Murray2019年9月7日
4

Needs a "ignore this site" feature. I have my own subscription to WSJ and this addon prevents me from logging in.

Language en
2 helpful · 0 not helpful
Yoram Bossenbroek2019年7月12日
5

Great application. I can now easily access papers without establish a VPN or remote desktop connection with my University. Two times I had an error at a certain site, but the responding time of the support teams from lean library and the TU Delft (my University) is very fast (within two hours) and both times they could fix the problem directly.

Language en
3 helpful · 0 not helpful