a vivid mosaic of open scientific literature, assembled in seconds
MOSAIC (Multi-sOurce Scientific Article Indexer and Collector) is a command-line tool for searching and downloading scientific papers from multiple open (and closed, if allowed) bibliographic databases.
Instead of visiting a dozen or more different websites to hunt for a paper, MOSAIC queries them all simultaneously, deduplicates results by DOI, and downloads open-access PDFs — including those found via Unpaywall — in one shot. Results can also be sent directly to a Google NotebookLM notebook for AI-powered Q&A, audio overviews, video summaries, slide decks, mind maps, flashcards, quizzes, infographics, study guides, and more.
Why MOSAIC?
Finding scientific papers across databases is tedious:
- Each database has its own search syntax and web interface
- The same paper often appears in multiple databases under slightly different metadata
- Locating a free legal PDF requires checking the journal site, arXiv, PubMed Central, and institutional repositories
- There is no programmatic way to keep a local archive of your searches
- There is no automatic summary creation for bibliographics collections
MOSAIC solves all of this in a single command.
Design principles
- One command, many sources — fan-out search with transparent deduplication
- Legal open-access only by default — no paywall circumvention
- Closed-access — supported by users API key (if provided, e.g. Elsevier source)
- Minimal dependencies —
httpx,typer,rich,tomli-w; no heavy frameworks - Offline-friendly — local SQLite cache means repeated queries are instant
- Extensible — each source is an independent class; adding a new one takes ~50 lines
- Custom sources — wire any number of JSON REST APIs as new sources with a few lines of TOML each, no Python needed
- AI-powered artifacts creation (summary, presentation, podcast, ecc...) by Google NotebookLM
Authors
- Stefano Zaghi — @szaghi
License
MOSAIC is available under your choice of license:
| License | SPDX |
|---|---|
| GNU General Public License v3 | GPL-3.0-or-later |
| BSD 2-Clause | BSD-2-Clause |
| BSD 3-Clause | BSD-3-Clause |
| MIT | MIT |