For freedom of information
New extension for Chrome finds Free versions of Scientific articles
Julia Korowski, XX2 century
On April 4, Unpaywall was officially launched – an extension for the Google Chrome browser that allows you to legally and for free read scientific articles hidden behind a paywall. The new service is very easy to use and easily finds sensational scientific research, but it is unlikely to completely replace Sci-Hub.
If you install Unpaywall and then open the abstract of an article in a scientific journal, a lock icon will appear on the right side of the page. It can be gray or green, depending on whether the extension managed to find a free version of the article. The search is performed on databases and legal repositories of publications – Crossref, Google Scholar, Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, Arxiv.org , PubMed Central and others. According to the creators, Unpaywall scans about ten million articles. When the lock turns green, it remains only to click on it – the PDF version opens in a new tab.
The developers of the extension are the ImpactStory NGO, which advocates openness of data and "radical transparency" of communication. The service of the same name created by the company allows scientists to track the impact of scientific publications on the Internet – for example, it shows how many articles in Wikipedia or posts on Reddit refer to scientific work and which media have written about it. "We are like Google Scholar for the online audience of your research," the site explains. Last year, ImpactStory launched oaDOI, a tool for searching for free versions of articles by the digital object identifier (DOI), which every scientific publication has. Unpaywall relies on oaDOI, but it also uses new data sources, and, according to the creators, "tries to analyze and understand" pages with scientific publications. Therefore, the new extension works better than its predecessor.
How does Unpaywall differ from another famous service, Sci-Hub? If Sci-Hub is blatant, albeit noble, piracy, then the new extension is absolutely legal. It uses only those materials that the authors or publishers themselves have posted on the Internet. Sci-Hub first searches for articles on the site of another pirate site – LibGen, and if it does not find it, bypasses the paywall on the site of the desired journal using access keys provided by scientists from different universities. After that, it not only shows the articles to the user, but also uploads them to other sites, for example, the same LibGen.
Unpaywall performed well during the tests – he found free versions of 84% of the articles from the selection of the most high-profile scientific papers of last year "Altmetric Top 100 2016". The probability of success depends on which articles the user is looking for, but the developers say that the extension works more than half of the time. Can Unpaywall replace a pirate service in this case? Unlikely. Firstly, there are almost six times more articles in the Sci-Hub database – about 58 million versus 10 million. Secondly, it is not surprising that Unpaywall easily finds "hit" publications: it is logical to expect that sensational articles will appear online sooner or later or that the media will rather choose to cover work published in the public domain. It can be much more difficult to read new and unknown materials with its help – and then Sci-Hub will remain the only way out.
However, some scientists and journalists have found the extension useful. Holly Bik, a marine biologist at the University of California, Riverside, told Nature News that she uses Unpaywall off-campus. "I can quickly open and download PDF versions of articles, and I don't have to log in via VPN to access a university magazine subscription." Journalist The New Yorker Nicola Twilley was also pleased and tweeted: "I installed Unpaywall half an hour ago; he already found me a free version of the article for which I was going to pay."
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05.04.2017