Browser Extension Offers Free, Legal Access to Scientific Papers Behind Paywalls
Last week, I published an article about SciHub, a dark web project that publishes scientific journal articles for anyone to view. This approach, while not legal, does help provide open access to scientific journal articles that the public would otherwise not have.
I now have great news for people who want to access journal articles legally. It's a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox called Unpaywall. After adding the extension to your browser, if you visit a page for a journal article that's behind a paywall, Unpaywall will scan its database of author-uploaded PDFs to see if a copy of the paper is available for free. If the lock icon on the page turns green, you can read the article right away!
According to the site's FAQ, Unpaywall can find the "full text for 50-85% of articles, depending on their topic and year of publication." How is this different from SciHub? Here's what Unpaywall says:
Like Unpaywall, Sci-Hub finds fulltext PDFs for paywalled articles. The main difference is where those PDFs come from: Unpaywall finds PDFs legally uploaded by the authors themselves, while Sci-Hub uses PDFs that are obtained by other means, including automated web scraping of publisher sites. Sci-Hub's method delivers more comprehensive results, but is not super legal. So while we're not against Sci-Hub, we think Unpaywall offers a more sustainable approach by working within copyright law and supporting the growing open access movement.
The open access movement is what I touched on in my last article, where taxpayer-funded research becomes available publicly for anyone to review. Unpaywall is helping to make strides toward this goal of open access to research for everyone. The extension is developed by Impactstory, a non-profit which aims to increase access to science online. They are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The Chrome version of the extension currently has just over 73,000 users, while the Firefox version has around 12,500. I believe that many people have no idea that so many papers are available to them, so I wanted to help spread the word via this post. If you're a fan of science, I invite you to install Unpaywall, give it a great rating in the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Addons page, and ReSteem this post so that more people can take advantage of the opportunity.
You can download the extension for Chrome or Firefox by visiting Unpaywall's official website.
You may also visit the extension's GitHub page here.
As a graduate student, I won't be needing Unpaywall for a few more years, but I'm glad to know I'll be able to use it once I no longer have access to my institution's library collections. Hopefully Unpaywall and SciHub will lead to lower costs for journal collections, as well as access to research for everyone.
If you install Unpaywall and you want to use it right away, here are some suggested articles in my field of research that I recommend that have a free copy available:
The Future of Seawater Desalination: Energy, Technology, and the Environment
Water permeability and water/salt selectivity tradeoff in polymers for desalination
Thanks for reading, and I hope this post will help you in your scientific pursuits! For more information on Unpaywall, check out this article, or visit the extension's website!
Please consider upvoting this post and resteeming to spread the word about science! We can use Steemit to make a difference!
I am concerned with global warming, sometimes I think the science is slow to be released. I want the latest Scientific data only if it's been vetted by other scientists.
Most of the top journals still peer review. However there's hardly ever any funding given for repeat studies, so as long as a paper passes the quality check by other scientists in the field, it can get published. I know for a fact that the reviewers of papers take their jobs very seriously though.
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