paper-reader

A scientific-paper reading tool that turns PDFs into page images and extracts notes about implementation details. Papers over 300 pages are read in chapter-based or 50-page chunks and combined into a master notes.md file.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to read papers and produce implementation-focused notes, including for documents longer than 300 pages.
Why use it?
It makes long research papers easier to read systematically and keeps the extracted findings in one notes file.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ctoth/research-papers-plugin/paper-reader
Any agent
npx skills add ctoth/research-papers-plugin --skill paper-reader
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ctoth/research-papers-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 83 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 9,378 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin unknown No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00083 $0.09378
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.04689
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.01876
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00938

Measured 2d ago against content hash c20073ef6b5c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

paper-reader scanned grade C with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (scripts/build_keymap.py, scripts/emit_nested_reader_fallback.py, scripts/paper_hash.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

rm -rf "$tmpdir"
plugins/research-papers/skills/paper-reader/SKILL.md · 789 lines

The source is not reproduced here

No licence file

A repository with no LICENSE is all rights reserved by default, so the body is not copied here. The metadata, the measurements and the link are.

Read it on GitHub

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 789 lines · 83 tokens per session scan C c20073ef6b5c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

paper-reader is a skill published in the GitHub repository ctoth/research-papers-plugin (31 stars, last pushed 8d ago), with no licence file. It adds 83 tokens to every session and 9,378 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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