Thursday, April 6, 2017

Easier routes to open access

"How a Browser Extension Could Shake Up Academic Publishing" by Lindsay McKenzie (Chronicle of Higher Education, April 06, 2017) notes two different tools that make it easier to find if an article is freely available.
  • Unpaywall is a browser extension that provides info about and links to free versions when you browse to an article behind a paywall;
  • Open Access Button is database (also with browser extension) that searches by title, citation, DOI, etc. across multiple sources for freely accessible versions.
Both projects are "open-source, nonprofit, and dedicated to improving access to scholarly research."