Finding Open Access moves on

Some time ago in 2013 the OA button arrived and I wrote a bit about it.

Back then it was a bookmarklet that sat with your browser bookmarks. . You could use it to identify when and where you were trying to access a paywalled article.

4 years on it is a browser extension (I'm using Chrome - have not checked Firefox or others) you can use on the web to locate open access versions of articles, or if none found to request an OA version be made available. The requests are forwarded to researchers for legal open access copies to be archived in a repository. There is no guarantee that your request will be satisfied, but it helps to communicate to researchers the demand and importance of OA.

I have used it from our Library discovery system (Primo) and it worked OK, I assume using the DOI in the article record I was viewing. DOI, PMID and some other identifiers may be used.



There is also an Unpaywall extension. It's official launch is April 4 2017 - so it is a less mature product. This one is designed to automatically display an indicator of whether an OA version is available while viewing an article metadata page. This one is not working with my Library discovery system, nor a ResearchGate, nor the Australian Library Journal on Taylor and Francis pages, but it does work with some journal sites.




Ex Libris has planned to incorporate oadoi as an option in Alma's uresolver. This will provide a similar kind of finding option to locate open access versions where a DOI is available in a citation in Primo.  I'm looking forward to adding that one to our interface. It will be interesting to see what if any impact this has on our document delivery service.

For news about these extensions..
Follow @oaDOI_org
Follow Unpaywall