Finding legal Open Access copies with ease
Wikipedia quotes Peter Suber of Harvard University as follows on Open Access.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.[1]
It’s a wonderful introduction, but what does it mean to you? Watch a video below, to see Open Access Helper in action and then continue reading.
As you’ve seen, it means that a large body of scientific research is accessible without charge, free on the web and Open Access Helper is a tool, which will help you find these Open Access copies, even if the main publication is still behind a paywall.
Open Access Helper does this by neatly integrating with Safari on macOS and iOS and then interacting with the API from unpaywall.org to lookup possible Open Access copies for these documents.
The copy identified, might differ from the published document and thus, whenever we get the Open Access copy via unpaywall.org, the tool will clearly identify the version presented.
You’ll find these labels:
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Submitted Version is not yet peer-reviewed.
- Accepted Version is peer-reviewed, but lacks publisher-specific formatting.
- Published Version is the version of record