Tech News

The service works by searching for a probed paper’s distinctive digital tag — a string of numbers and letters known as its DOI, or digital object identifier — against those of articles gathered from 50,000 journals and repositories. Since its takeoff, Unpaywall’s technology has also been incorporated into many university-library detection systems, so that users can easily find freely available versions of research papers in institutional sources. These archives, which are run by universities, funders, and others, host a large portion of articles in Unpaywall’s database but were hard to search thoroughly in the past.