food-fetch

name	food-fetch
description	Lawfully acquire the full text of academic articles so the research and review skills can read papers, not just abstracts. Routes each article through legal open access (Unpaywall/OpenAlex/PMC/arXiv), the user's own reference-manager library (EndNote/Zotero/Mendeley PDFs), and — only with the user's own logged-in institutional browser session — their library's entitled full text, then extracts the text and writes a manifest of what was and was not obtained. Open-access articles are always downloaded and read, never left at abstract-level. Never bypasses paywalls, DRM, or logins. Use to fetch PDFs for a reference list or DOIs, get full text behind a subscription the user is entitled to, or build a full-text corpus. Triggers: download these papers, get the full text, fetch the PDFs for these DOIs, retrieve full text for my reference list, access the article through my library, build a full-text corpus.
metadata	{"version":"1.0.0","verified":"2026-07","subagents":["fetch_coordinator","access_router","oa_fetcher","library_fetcher","institutional_fetcher","content_reader"],"related_skills":["food-research","food-deep-research","food-review","food-paper","agri-research","agri-review"],"references":["references/access-routing.md","references/institution-profiles.md","references/institutional-access.md","references/format-reading.md","references/manifest-and-status.md","references/boundaries.md"]}

Food-Fetch — Lawful Full-Text Acquisition

Turn a list of references or DOIs into read full text, so food-research, food-deep-research, and food-review build their knowledge base from the actual papers rather than abstracts. Original work; the routing/manifest architecture is informed by the open-source nature-downloader skill (see the repo README Acknowledgements). Legal-access-only, and it never fabricates — a paper that was not obtained is recorded as not obtained, never summarized as if read.

First-run setup — ask once, remember, remind if skipped

On the first run that needs full text, help the user set up access — this is what decides whether the review reads real papers. Check python3 scripts/food_fetch_setup.py status (exit 3 = not set up):

• If not set up, surface a highlighted request offering the choices, then save the answer so it isn't asked again:

  📚 Set up full-text access (one-time). To read papers, not just abstracts, pick one:

  1. Reference-manager library — send the path to your EndNote .Data folder (or Zotero storage/ / Mendeley). Best coverage for cited work.
  2. Institutional access — I'll reach entitled full text through your own logged-in library session in the browser when needed.
  3. Open access only — no setup, but see the warning below.

  ⚠️ Without access to non-open-access articles, the accuracy of the results is substantially limited — most published papers are paywalled, so the knowledge base and every claim's grounding would rest on abstracts + the ~half of literature that is open access.

  Save the choice: food_fetch_setup.py set --library <path> / --institutional / --open-access-only.

• If already set up (exit 0), use the saved mode silently — do not re-ask.

• If the saved mode is open_access_only, remind at the start of each full-text run — briefly, once — that non-OA access is not configured and that this substantially limits accuracy, and offer to switch (options 1–2). Don't block; proceed at open-access + abstract level.

The store holds only a folder path and a mode — never a password, cookie, or token.

Access ladder (each article, in order) — see references/access-routing.md

1. Open access — resolve a legal free PDF (Unpaywall → OpenAlex; PMC/Europe PMC full text; arXiv/preprints) and download it. oa_fetcher runs scripts/fetch_oa.py. Open-access full text is always fetched and read — never left at abstract-level.
2. The user's reference-manager library — library_fetcher reads the PDFs the user already downloaded in EndNote (<Library>.Data/PDF/), Zotero (storage/), or Mendeley, mapping each reference by DOI/title. Read-only.
3. The user's entitled institutional access — institutional_fetcher reuses the user's own logged-in library session in the browser (Claude-in-Chrome) to open the article through their library resolver / EZproxy / Shibboleth-CARSI / WebVPN and save the entitled PDF. User-driven login only. See references/institutional-access.md.
4. User-supplied PDFs — anything the user drops in the project folder.

If none reaches it, the article is oa_not_found / library_no_permission — the user is told plainly, and the source stays unread (not summarized).

Subagents (dispatch via the Agent tool)

1. fetch_coordinator — takes the reference list / DOIs, confirms the Supporting Information choice once, runs the batch, and returns the manifest + a plain summary of read vs unread.
2. access_router — per article, normalize the DOI/title, detect open-access vs paywalled and publisher, and choose the ladder step (references/access-routing.md).
3. oa_fetcher — download every open-access PDF via scripts/fetch_oa.py; verify each is a real PDF (%PDF); record source + SHA-256.
4. library_fetcher — match references to PDFs in the user's reference-manager library folder and read them (read-only).
5. institutional_fetcher — with the user's own browser session, reach the library-entitled full text and save the PDF; hand off to the user for any login/CAPTCHA/2FA (references/institutional-access.md).
6. content_reader — normalize each obtained article (XML/HTML/PDF) into clean sectioned full text, preferring structured JATS XML over scraped PDF (references/format-reading.md); never treat an abstract or a login page as the paper.

Deliverable — a coverage manifest (references/manifest-and-status.md)

Always return one manifest listing every requested reference with a typed status (open_access_downloaded · library_pdf_read · institutional_downloaded · oa_not_found · library_no_permission · pdf_fetch_failed · not_a_pdf), its access route, and file/SHA-256 where downloaded — plus a one-line count of how many were read in full vs not. This is what makes the review's grounding honest and auditable. Run scripts/privacy_scan.py on anything delivered.

Boundaries (non-negotiable) — references/boundaries.md

Lawful access only: legal OA, the user's own library files, and the user's own authorized institutional session. Never bypass a paywall, DRM, or 2FA; never read, type, export, or ask for passwords / cookies / OTP codes / session tokens; never scrape against a site's terms; no bulk/indiscriminate downloading — only the confirmed list. For a login or verification challenge, hand the browser to the user.

Called by

food-research (screener_appraiser/data_extractor), food-deep-research (investigator/source_verifier), and food-review (knowledge_builder) call food-fetch to obtain full text before extracting; the agri-* skills via delegation.