New browser extension assists access to legal, open access, full text research
In previous articles I’ve discussed the importance of open access research and reported on current trends in open access.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a new tool that promised to make the search for open access publications easier. Unpaywall is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox:
When an Unpaywall user lands on the page of a research article, the software scours thousands of institutional repositories, preprint servers, and websites like PubMed Central to see if an open-access copy of the article is available. If it is, users can click a small green tab on the side of the screen to view a PDF.
Uptake and user feedback have so far been good:
Officially begun on April 4, an early version of the Unpaywall extension has been available for a few weeks and has been downloaded about about 10,000 times.
Feedback has been positive, says Mr. Priem, particularly from researchers in the developing world, where institutional subscriptions are limited.
Article source: The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Header image source: Unpaywall.
Also published on Medium.
Nice — just installed it. if you can’t install browser extensions for any reason, Google Scholar is still a great place to search for PDF versions of papers [http://scholar.google.com]. Just plug in the title of DOI of the paper you want to read.