5. Paywalled papers

The 2005 review of electric propulsion modelling by Boyd is an Elsevier paper with no open copy:

$ mosaic get 10.1016/j.paerosci.2006.01.001
Numerical modeling of spacecraft electric propulsion thrusters (2005)
Could not find a downloadable PDF for this DOI.
Have access? Retry with --handoff (your own browser; works for Elsevier) or --interactive (a browser window mosaic
drives).

If your institution subscribes, you can read it in your browser. mosaic has four ways to turn that access into a file in the library; for Elsevier the first one now finishes the job without you clicking anything.

Driving your Chrome (--auto)

mosaic get 10.1016/j.paerosci.2006.01.001 --auto

--auto opens your Chrome (or Edge; on WSL the Windows one) with a dedicated mosaic profile and walks the same moves you would make: article page, the paper's "Download PDF" link, and Chrome's own download. The PDF lands in a mosaic watch folder and is filed under the paper's name. ScienceDirect's PDF endpoints sit behind fingerprint checks that every automatically installed browser fails; a genuine Chrome passes them, so this is the pass that finishes Elsevier unattended.

You log in once per publisher; browsers' session cookies die with the window, so a fresh run may ask again and wait three minutes per site. The pass is strictly sequential with a pause between papers and stops a site after three consecutive walls, so re-running is always safe. Authenticated access has the full description and the guardrails.

Your browser does the download

$ mosaic get 10.1016/j.paerosci.2006.01.001 --handoff --watch-dir ~/Downloads
Numerical modeling of spacecraft electric propulsion thrusters (2005)

Hand-off of 1 paper(s) to your browser: watching ~/Downloads for each PDF you download (one paper at a time).

[1/1] Numerical modeling of spacecraft electric propulsion thrusters (2005)
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376042106000029
  Opened in your browser: download the PDF there. Press Enter when done, or to skip this paper.
  ✓ 1-s2.0-S0376042106000029-main.pdf → 2005_Crossref_Boyd_Numerical_modeling_of_spacecraft_electric_propulsion_thruste.pdf
Saved: ~/mosaic-papers/2005_Crossref_Boyd_Numerical_modeling_of_spacecraft_electric_propulsion_thruste.pdf

When a publisher needs a click mosaic cannot type for you (a CAPTCHA, or a wall the auto pass could not pass), --handoff opens the article page in your default browser (on WSL, the Windows one), where your institutional login already lives, and watches your Downloads folder. You click "Download PDF" as usual; when the file is complete, mosaic checks that it is a PDF, moves it into the library under the paper's name and opens the next paper. Enter in the terminal means "done with this paper", or skips it.

mosaic finds the Downloads folder by itself, also the Windows one from WSL; --watch-dir PATH names another. With --from refs.bib --handoff, only the papers that fail the normal way are handed to you, one at a time.

PDFs you already have

Downloaded a paper before you had mosaic, or a hand-off ended before the file arrived? mosaic import files it:

$ mosaic import ~/Downloads/1-s2.0-S0094576517312663-main.pdf
  ✓ 1-s2.0-S0094576517312663-main.pdf
    → ~/mosaic-papers/2018_Crossref_Cai_Three-dimensional_particle_simulation_of_ion_thruster_plume.pdf
    Three-dimensional particle simulation of ion thruster plume impingement (2018), DOI 10.1016/j.actaastro.2018.07.007, found via metadata

mosaic finds the DOI in the file's metadata, or reads the article ID that ScienceDirect puts in its file names (1-s2.0-<PII>-main.pdf) and asks Crossref, or takes the only DOI printed in the text. When none of these works, pass --doi. The file is moved into the library and recorded as a download:

$ ls ~/Downloads ~/mosaic-papers
~/Downloads:

~/mosaic-papers:
2004_arXiv_Jose_Plasma_Diagnostic_and_Performance_of_a_Permanent_Magnet_Hall.pdf
2005_Crossref_Boyd_Numerical_modeling_of_spacecraft_electric_propulsion_thruste.pdf
2018_Crossref_Cai_Three-dimensional_particle_simulation_of_ion_thruster_plume.pdf
2019_Crossref_Taccogna_Latest_progress_in_Hall_thrusters_plasma_modelling.pdf
2019_DOAJ_Zahra_Numerical_Study_of_Electron_Cyclotron_Drift_Instability_Appl.pdf
2023_arXiv_Farbod_Effects_of_the_neutral_dynamics_model_on_the_particle-in-cel.pdf
2023_arXiv_Maryam_Reduced-order_particle-in-cell_simulations_of_a_high-power_m.pdf

Letting mosaic drive a browser

For publishers that accept automated browsers, two more ways need the browser extra and a Playwright browser (Installation):

mosaic auth login springer --url https://link.springer.com   # log in once, cookies saved
mosaic get 10.1007/s41614-019-0033-1                          # later downloads use the session
mosaic get 10.1088/1361-6595/ab46c5 --interactive             # a visible window: you solve the check

$ mosaic auth status
No saved sessions. Use mosaic auth login <name> --url <url> to add one.

Sessions expire with the publisher's login cookies, within hours or days; mosaic auth status shows how old each one is. ScienceDirect works with --auto; for the next best, --handoff (your own browser, your click) always works. Authenticated access compares the four methods publisher by publisher.

What you learned

get --auto drives your Chrome through Elsevier's PDF chain and files each download unattended; get --handoff files what you download in your own browser; mosaic import files PDFs you already have; auth login and --interactive let mosaic drive a browser where publishers allow it. Reference: get, import, auth.

Next: 6. Exporting.