If you like reading science journal or research papers, you probably felt frustrated every time you hit a paywall. That is when the material you're trying to access is not available for free and you need to subscribe first, and of course pay, to read or download the full copy.
image from Unpaywall
If you are not comfortable in using Sci-hub, the so-called Piratebay of science, this browser extension will help you find more than 19 million Open Access (OA) articles (with Digital Object Identifier or DOI) dating as far back as 1900.
Unpaywall works by gathering content from thousands of open-access repositories worldwide and rely on various data sources, including PubMed Central, The DOAJ, Crossref, DataCite, Google Scholar, and BASE. They put these data together and open it for reuse via their own oaDOI API. So everytime you run into a paywalled article, Unpaywall will try to find fulltexts from their API.
Most of the time, the researchers, who believe that their works should not be hoarded behind paywalls, upload their papers to free and legal servers online. Unpaywall helps by bringing that open access content to everyone.
So before you pay, give Unpaywall a try.
Enjoy reading!
This is a really great posts, which shed light on a really important problem in the academic community.
There are a lot of researches out there throughout the world associated with for example universities and organizations who doesn't have to resources to pay for access to closed access research articles. So it's likely that brilliant researches in many countries are working on problems already solved by researches elsewhere, but the for former researchers have no way of accessing the closed access papers and thus no way of gaining knowledge about those papers.
So open access journals are critical for research results being accessible to all researchers, regardless of the financial situation of the university or organisation they are associated with.
Yes. Actually the there is a growing trend among researchers and scholars towards open access. I hope someday that these journals will be open to anyone specially if its funded by the public.
thanks for dropping by.
Please do keep posting on issues like this. These are the types of issues that really can make difference.
Sure I'll try. If you're interested in science and would like to engage with the steemit community, please check our steemit.chat channel here. thanks! :)
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