Unpaywall For Mac

Unpaywall offers you the possibility to get access to full scholar articles even if you don’t have a paid subscription to the respective publications.

Unlike other similar projects, Unpaywall goes through various online sources, such as open-access repositories, to find PDF documents that have been legally obtained or uploaded by the author.

The Unpaywall project is maintained by a non-profit organization that aims to deliver access to the collective human knowledge even if you don’t have the funds to pay the subscriptions to various publications.

Unpaywall relies on open-access repositories and other sources that host legally obtained or uploaded documents. The list of data sources includes the DOAL, Crossref, PubMed Central, BASE, Google Scholar, DataCite, and more.

The Unpaywall project provides Firefox and Chrome extension that quickly integrate with the browsers and let you know if the article you are currently trying to read can be found on other sources.

Worth mentioning is that Unpaywall does not make its presence know unless it is necessary and just places a locked or unlocked icon on the right side of the window. If you click on the respective icon, the extension will launch the PDF document containing the full article in a new tab.

The Unpaywall extension can use different color codes to signal if the article is made available by the publisher under an open license (gold), if it is available via an institutional repository (green), or if license information is not available (blue).

Unpaywall is a simple tool that can let you know if you can get unpaid access to a specific scholar article. The extension relies only on legal sources and, if available, will open the full-text PDF documents with a simple mouse click.

Naturally, Unpaywall does not guarantee that it will find the text for all scholar articles: the developers estimate that the success rate is around 65% to 85%, and it greatly depends on the research field and publication date.