Doiget MCP Server

doiget

A single-binary CLI + stdio MCP server that turns DOIs and arXiv ids into local PDFs through official, OA-first APIs.

Docs: stable = the Zola site (built from main); dev = rustdoc built from next; API = docs.rs (latest published release).

Status: Shipping on crates.io (doiget-core, doiget-cli, doiget-mcp), with sigstore-signed binaries + an SBOM attached to the GitHub Release. Tier 1 + Tier 2 sources, the stdio MCP server, citation-graph expansion, and gated TDM sources are all implemented. Releases are cut by a single signed git tag through the tag-driven pipeline (see ADR-0025); release-plz was retired. See CHANGELOG.md for history and docs/PHASES.md for the phase plan.

Posture

doiget is a general-purpose automation tool for retrieving papers via official publisher APIs. By design, doiget only attempts retrieval through:

1. Public Open Access sources (default — Crossref, Unpaywall, arXiv).
2. Credentials the user has personally configured for their own institutional or personal subscriptions (opt-in, compile-time gated).

doiget does not work around any access control mechanism, redistribute papers, host content, operate as a SaaS, or bundle any publisher API keys.

Users are responsible for ensuring they have the right to access the content they request and for compliance with each source's Terms of Service.

See docs/LEGAL.md and docs/SCOPE.md.

Documentation

Architecture: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md Threat model: docs/SECURITY.md Permanent non-goals: docs/SCOPE.md Phase plan: docs/PHASES.md ADRs: docs/DECISIONS/

Installation

doiget ships a single self-contained binary — the Linux build is fully static (musl), so it runs on old glibc / HPC boxes too. Every channel installs the same checksum-verified binary from the signed GitHub Release.

Recommended: use a prebuilt binary (no Rust toolchain, no compiler). The shell / PowerShell installers below download the signed release binary directly. cargo install (further down) instead compiles from source and therefore needs a working C/C++ build toolchain — see that section for the per-platform requirements.

Shell installer (Linux / macOS)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/QAtlasHub/doiget/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Installs to ~/.local/bin (override with DOIGET_INSTALL_DIR); pin a version with DOIGET_VERSION=0.6.0. The script verifies the published SHA-256 sidecar before installing.

PowerShell installer (Windows)

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/QAtlasHub/doiget/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

Upgrading. Re-run the installer. It says which version it replaced and leaves a doiget.install.json beside the binary. doiget never checks for updates by itself (ADR-0015). To see which binary is actually running, including the one an MCP config names by path, use doiget capabilities (build) or the doiget_health tool. Both report the version, the channel, the install method and that method's update command. doiget version --check compares with the latest release when you ask. A Claude Desktop .mcpb extension is never updated automatically; install the new .mcpb from the latest release.

From crates.io (Rust toolchain — compiles from source)

The published crate is doiget-cli (it produces the doiget binary). cargo install doiget does not work — there is no crate by that bare name:

cargo install doiget-cli   # installs the `doiget` binary

Because this compiles from source, you need a C/C++ build toolchain (a linker is mandatory — cargo install cannot link a binary without one):

• Linux: gcc/clang + make (e.g. build-essential).
• macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).
• Windows: either the Visual Studio Build Tools with the "Desktop development with C++" workload (provides link.exe), or a MinGW-w64 toolchain used via the GNU target (rustup toolchain install stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu + cargo +stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu install doiget-cli).

If you don't have (or don't want) a build toolchain, use one of the prebuilt installers above — they need no compiler.

npm / npx — one line in an agent config

npx -y doiget-cli serve      # MCP server, no install step
npm install -g doiget-cli    # or put `doiget` on PATH

The package is doiget-cli and the command it installs is doiget — the same shape as cargo install doiget-cli, which is where the name comes from. npm refuses the unscoped name doiget as too similar to the unrelated giget, and matching the crate turned out to be the better answer regardless: one name for the tool on both registries.

The npm packages carry the same signed release binaries as optionalDependencies — npm resolves the one matching your platform, and there is no postinstall download, so this works under --ignore-scripts and through a corporate registry mirror. npm view doiget version tells you what is published; the packages ship from tagged releases, so a very new commit may be ahead of them.

Homebrew

brew tap QAtlasHub/doiget https://github.com/QAtlasHub/doiget
brew install doiget

The tap lives in this repository rather than a separate homebrew-doiget, which is why the tap line carries an explicit URL. A dedicated tap repo would shorten it to brew tap QAtlasHub/doiget; the formula would move across unchanged.

Formula/doiget.rb installs the same signed release binary the GitHub Release publishes, pinned by the sha256 from that release's own .sha256 asset — the file the shell installer verifies against, so the two channels cannot disagree about what they installed. It is generated by scripts/update-homebrew-formula.sh, never hand-edited, and CI fails if the committed formula is not what the generator produces.

The formula tracks the latest stable release, so it can trail a very new tag by one commit; brew info doiget shows which version it pins.

Claude Code plugin

/plugin marketplace add QAtlasHub/doiget
/plugin install doiget@doiget

Reads .claude-plugin/ from this repository's default branch. The plugin's .mcp.json runs npx -y doiget-cli serve, so it needs nothing installed beforehand — npm fetches the wrapper and the one matching platform binary on first run. Until this it ran a bare doiget, which meant the plugin worked only for people who had already installed doiget some other way; that is why it was self-hosted rather than submitted to the Anthropic plugin directory, and why it is now submittable.

Channel status

Docker was ranked second in #501 on the grounds that a container is "the only architecture the Tier-3 features can legally be used in". That premise does not hold: ADR-0002 decides that the default published binary contains no TDM source code at all, and an image built from the published binary would ship oa-only,citation like every other prebuilt channel. The architecture the sentence describes is real, and it is served by building from source with --features tdm-<publisher>, which is not a distribution channel. What remains is "a shape enterprises can pin and scan" — worth something, but doiget is a single statically-linked binary, so a container solves no dependency problem here and the existing .sha256 plus cosign bundle already give a pinnable, verifiable artefact.

npm was the one channel whose pipeline was written and whose packages did not exist. npm Trusted Publishing cannot perform a package's first publish — the setting lives under a package's Settings, and there is no Settings page for a package that has never been published — so the release job, which carries no token by design, cannot create them. scripts/bootstrap-npm.sh does the once-only placeholder publish that unblocks it; CONTRIBUTING.md has the runbook.

As of 2026-08-27 the four per-platform packages are published as 0.0.0 placeholders. npm points latest at a package's first publish whatever --tag says, so those placeholders are deprecated — that notice is the only warning until a release moves latest to a real version.

#247 was closed as completed while four of its five channels did not exist; the remaining ones are tracked in #501. Every release asset is cosign-keyless signed (<asset>.cosign.bundle) for optional verification.

Quick start

# Fetch a paper by DOI (Open Access only by default)
doiget fetch 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.200601

# Fetch by arXiv id
doiget fetch arXiv:2401.12345

# Batch fetch
doiget batch refs.txt

# Verify a bibliography's references resolve (no PDF download) — CI gate
doiget verify docs/references.bib --strict

# Lint a .bib for structural issues (no network): missing fields,
# blank fields, $$-display-math titles. Read-only and math-aware.
doiget lint docs/references.bib

# Inspect what was fetched
doiget info 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.200601

# Run as MCP server (stdio)
doiget serve

Default features fetch only Open Access PDFs through Crossref / Unpaywall / arXiv. Institutional TDM access (Springer OA, APS Harvest, Elsevier ScienceDirect TDM) is not in the default published binary; it must be opted in at build time per publisher. See docs/SOURCES.md.

Stores written by BiblioFetch.jl

doiget's store format (TOML metadata + PDF files under a configurable store root, docs/STORE.md) began as a format shared with BiblioFetch.jl. That contract is retired (ADR-0060), and the format did not change: point doiget at an existing store (DOIGET_STORE_ROOT=~/papers) and it reads it, preserving the [bibliofetch] table it does not own. doiget defaults to ./papers (ADR-0036).

License

MIT for the doiget source code and binaries (see LICENSE).

The license under which doiget retrieves papers is separate and is determined by each paper's own license, the publisher's API Terms of Service, and the user's own access rights. doiget does not relicense fetched content.

Contact

Takedown requests, security disclosures, and other formal correspondence: CONTACT.md.