Paperbot is an command line utility that fetches academic papers. When given a URL on stdin or as a CLI argument, it fetches the content and returns a public link on stdout. This seems to help enhance the quality of discussion and make us less ignorant.
Paperbot can easily be turned back into an IRC bot with irctk
All content is scraped using zotero/translators. These are javascript scrapers that work on a large number of academic publisher sites and are actively maintained. Paperbot offloads links to zotero/translation-server, which runs the zotero scrapers headlessly in a gecko and xulrunner environment. The scrapers return metadata and a link to the pdf. Then paperbot fetches that particular pdf. When given a link straight to a pdf, which paperbot is also happy to compulsively archive it.
Paperbot can try multiple instances of translation-server (configured to use different ways to access content) and different SOCKS proxies to retrieve the content.
BSD. Original project is: https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot