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Unpaywall

What is Unpaywall?

Unpaywall is a legal and copyright compliant service that maintains a database of links to full-text articles from Open Access sources. The content is harvested from legal sources including repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies, as well as open content hosted by publishers themselves. 

What is Open Access?

Open access is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers using repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies. Under some models of open access publishing, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.

How to use Unpaywall:

Unpaywall is integrated through our “One Search”

  1. Search for an article
  2. Look for the Open Access Icon
  3. Click on the record and look for the “Open Access version of full text found via:Unapywall” link to access the Open Access version.

Unpaywall instruction1

Unpaywall instruction2

Unpaywall for Google Searching

If you search for sources using Google, try the Unpaywall browser extension  this tools make it easier to getting legal full text open access articles through reputable, legal, copyright compliant sources such as repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies, as well as open content hosted by publishers themselves. 

The green tab means it is free! When using the browse extension if you browse to a paywalled paper, Unpaywall checks to see if there's a free copy available Open Access. If there is, you'll see a green tab on your screen...just click and read!

Open Access versions of an article are not always identical to the commercially published version.  If you have questions about Open Access versions of articles, please reach out to Library and Academic Services for support.

Unpaywall focuses on providing greater access to several types of open content:

  • Author-Archived Open Access content (“green OA”): Unpaywall captures OA versions of articles – generally manuscript versions – that authors have posted in repositories (while the final published versions appear in paid-access journals).
  • Hybrid OA content: Unpaywall captures individual articles which are available OA directly from the publisher, in a journal which is otherwise available only by paid subscription.
  • Full OA journal content: Unpaywall captures articles which are published in full OA journals and indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals or other sources.
https://library.rrc.ca/BrowseBorrow/Unpaywall
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