Unpaywall: a new tool for OA papers


The team of Impactstory, an open-source website that helps researchers in sharing their works, developped a new tool: Unpaywall.

What is Unpaywall and how it works
Unpaywall is a browser add-on (for Chrome and Firefox) that searches for available fulltext versions of academic articles in the web... legally! In fact Unpaywall PDFs legally uploaded by the authors themselves.

Once in an article page, an icon with a lock will appear on your screen:
  • the lock is gold when you find journal-hosted content with an Open license (example)
  • the lock is green when you find fulltext from an institutional repository or preprint server (example)
  • the lock is blue when the article is available in the current page, but lacking license information (often often that's because you're browsing from behind the paywall)
  • finally, the lock is grey and closed when there are no available fulltext version to download.

We absolute recommend to install the add-on because we know how can be unpleasant having to stop your research because you do not have access to an article (and maybe you have ask a copy through Interlibrary Loan service and wait for it).

And we also recommend to always upload  a legal fulltext version (pre-print, draft, post-print, etc.) of your published articles in institutional repositories (http://eprints.imtlucca.it/) or pre-print servers (like arXiv or Repec), so that other researchers can read (and cite) your works even without having a subscription to the journal. 

Turn all the locks green!






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