How a Browser Extension Could Shake Up Academic Publishing. Lindsay McKenzie. The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 06, 2017
There are several open-access initiatives. One initiative, called Unpaywall, is a just a browser extension. Unpaywall is an open-source, nonprofit organization "dedicated to improving access to scholarly research". It has created a browser extension to hopefully do one thing really well: instantly deliver legal, open-access, full text as you browse. "When an Unpaywall user lands on the page of a research article, the software scours thousands of institutional repositories, preprint servers, and websites like PubMed Central to see if an open-access copy of the article is available. If it is, users can click a small green tab on the side of the screen to view a PDF." A legally uploaded open-access copy is delivered to users more than half the time.
"It’s the scientists who wrote the articles, it’s the scientists who uploaded them — we’re just doing that very small amount of work to connect what the scientists have done to the readers who need to read the science." Open-access papers have the information but don’t always look like the carefully formatted articles in academic journals. Some users might not feel comfortable citing preprints or open-access versions obtained through Unpaywall, "without the trappings and formatting of traditional paywalled publishing," even if the copy is credible.
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