the corner office : tech blog

From How to get files from JAR dependencies in a plugin:

You could get the (runtime) class path of the current project via a mojo parameter like this:

   /**
    * @parameter default-value="${project.runtimeClasspathElements}"
    * @readonly
    */
   private List runtimeClassPath;

in combination with the mojo annotation @requiresDependencyResolution. From the class path, you can populate a URLClassLoader and call getResourceAsStream() on this.