Unpaywall: Free, legal access to scholarly articles! (and a couple of other strategies)

Greetings from Computers in Libraries 2017  from which I’ll be sharing a few discoveries. One exciting share from yesterday was the limited release of Unpaywall.org.  (The official release date is April 4.)

High school librarians and education researchers take note!

Installed as a  free browser extension for Firefox or Chrome, Unpaywall allows searchers to legally access full-text research papers from its index of ten million, legally loaded, open-access articles. The project currently shares that it is retrieving full-text content approximately 50% of the time.

After installing the extension, if you are browsing for a research article click the little green tab and, if it’s available, read it free–even if you do not have access to a scholarly database or full-text research journals.  No need to go visit the site of the subscription journal to see if Green Open Access.

Unpaywall.org is a project developed by Impactstory, a nonprofit working to make science more open and reusable online, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  

In its FAQs, ImpactStory explains the motivation behind the effort:

We loathe paywalls. Now more than ever, humanity needs to access our collective knowledge, not hoard it. Lots of scholars feel the same; that’s why they upload their papers to free, legal servers online. We realized that the missing link is in getting these free resources to the people who want them, at the right time. By using a browser extension, we can do that, leveraging the toll-access distribution system to bring open access to the masses.