Article: “How Unpaywall is Transforming Open Science”

A new article about a resource we’ve been posting about (several examples found below), talking about, and using since it was first announced.

From Nature:

Unpaywall consists of a database that includes a list of almost 20 million freely available scholarly articles. Most researchers access it using a browser plug-in that was released in 2017. The service works by searching for a queried paper’s unique digital tag — a string of numbers and letters known as its DOI, or digital object identifier — against those of articles gathered from 50,000 journals and repositories.
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Since its launch, Unpaywall’s technology has also been integrated into many university-library discovery systems, so that users can easily find freely available versions of research papers in institutional repositories.
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For [Jason] Priem [Unpaywall Co-Founder], making Unpaywall a go-to tool for researchers is just the start. Last month, Impactstory secured a US$850,000 grant to create a search engine aimed at non-scientists. It will also use artificial intelligence to summarize journal articles in its database in plain language, so that non-specialists can understand them. “20 million articles are free for everyone to read but might as well be closed if there is no way for any average person to access it,” he says. “We’re not yet finished.”

Read the Complete Article [approx. 1000 words]
More Posts About Unpaywall
July 2018: Elsevier and Impactstory Announce Partnership to Make Open Access Articles Easier to Find on Scopus
July 2018: Arcadia Awards Impactstory (Providers of Unpaywall), Internet Archive, and British Library $850,000 Grant to Build a Free, AI-Powered Search Engine of Open Access Scholarly Articles

April 2018: Europe PMC Integrates with Unpaywall

February 2018: “The State of OA: a Large-Scale Analysis of the Prevalence and Impact of Open Access Articles” (Peer-Reviewed Version)

See Also: Unpwaywall User Guides for Libraries and Research

Filed under: Awards, Funding, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users