USA Electronic Resources/Collection Development Librarian
Unpaywall: Access Paywalled Research for Free—Legally!
Did you know
that millions of research papers are available for free on government and
university web servers, legally uploaded by the authors themselves, with the
express permission of publishers? One
company, Unpaywall, has created a browser extension that automatically harvests
these freely shared papers from thousands of legal institutional repositories,
preprint servers, and publishers, making them all available to you as you
read.Users of
Unpaywall can view more than 52% of research papers for free. According to their website, they are able to
so because Unpaywall gathers its content “from legal sources
including repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly
societies, as well as open content hosted by publishers themselves.” Source: http://unpaywall.org/faq. Currently in
the Google Chrome Web Store, Unpaywall has over 157,000 users and is also
available as Safari and Firefox extensions.
Simply install the extension, and it will display a gold, green, or
bronze tab at the right-hand side of the screen when you encounter a paywalled
article.A gold tab indicates that the
article is available from a fully open access journal.Green means the article is on a preprint
server or institutional repository.
Bronze designates an article which is free to read on the current page,
but published in a toll-access journal.
Regardless of the color designation, adding the Unpaywall browser
extension can help you find open research articles with little to no fuss.
