Unpaywall & co.

Sometimes the articles you find through your online searches are locked behind paywalls. In this case, it might be useful to know whether open access versions of these papers exist and how to find them.

Open Sesame!

Many articles hiding behind paywalls have also been published elsewhere in open access. More and more funders and universities require authors to upload their accepted manuscripts to open repositories. Authors may also do this voluntarily, so the only question is: how can you find them?

Good news, everyone! Several tools were built to help you find OA versions of articles when you’re on the paywalled version’s page. They can help you, of course, but they are also essential for researchers outside traditional academic circles, such as NGOs or people in emerging and low-income countries. And it is fully legal!

A wide range of tools

Unpaywall has become an essential tool for students and scholars, with its impressive database of 27 million articles. This Chrome or Firefox extension is very user-friendly, and could change the life of many researchers. For Safari addicts, Open Access Helper, built upon Unpaywall, can be used on your MacBook or iPhone.

But Unpaywall is not alone. Endnote Click is an “all-in-one” tool that works as a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome and Opera. It uses your academic affiliation to identify the subscriptions of your university and look for the best (open or paywalled) version of the article.

Why are not all articles publicly accessible?

This is one of the great mysteries of academic life. Authors have everything to gain and nothing to lose by making their articles easily accessible. To be cited, you first need to be read. The “green route” enables authors to make their accepted manuscripts legally accessible, sometimes after an embargo period.

What’s the catch, then? Well, they need to send their accepted manuscript to a librarian, who will be happy to upload it to their institutional repository, and despite our community trying to spread the word for years, we have achieved little success. So why not get in touch with us to help us make this just a little more efficient for everyone?

Do you have any questions about the green route and the Graduate Institute repository? Our colleague Catherine Brendow will be happy to answer them… and to upload your accepted manuscripts to our repository if necessary.