Read Research Articles Hiding Behind Paid Access With This Chrome Extension
About half the time when I view a study I read about in a news article, the actual study is hidden behind a paywall.
I understand universities have bills too, but shelling out $ 30-40 for the opportunity to read a little more about scientific research that really interests me, but has no practical application, is not entirely true. a realistic proposal, at least not so often.
Unpaywall is a Chrome extension that makes this process easy.
Whenever you come across one of those articles that you have to pay for, the extension looks for the article to see if the author has published a free version somewhere.
Important note: this will not force you to opt out of paid access or content theft. Instead, it checks to see if there is another legal version online that you could read instead. The emphasis on “legal” in this proposal. If there is another copy online, you will see a green tab on the screen informing you of this.
The extension will only show documents that have been published “with the full and explicit permission of the publishers themselves.” According to the extension’s creator, “Most scientific journals allow authors to ‘self-archive’ their articles on university and government web servers. Unpaywall helps users find these legally self-archived documents. Any articles published without the permission of the publisher are NOT included in our index. “
Especially with the school year starting now, this can be a valuable tool while writing a research paper.