Posted on 04/06/2017 9:20:18 AM PDT by Red Badger
Credit: unpaywall.org ==============================================================================================================================
(Phys.org)—A group calling itself Impactstory, a nonprofit team whose mission is to make science more accessible to everyone, has released a free Chrome/Firefox extension called Unpaywall that allows users to access some research papers that lie behind a paywall without having to pay to access the paywall site. The official release date was April 4, but users have been able to download and use it for several weeks.
A paywall, of course, blocks unpaid access to articles published by a website. Those who do not pay can generally read an abstract but not the full text. Researchers are eager to have their work published on such journal sites, because publication offers prestige and some degree of assurance to readers that the work has been peer reviewed. But because of the way research papers are written, they quite often wind up on the internet where they can be read for free before they are accepted by one of the established journals. The prepress site arXiv, run by Cornell University Library, for example, allows researchers to post their work for review by others before they submit to a journal. Many people who wish to access papers behind paywalls have discovered that they can often find them for free elsewhere, but it takes a lot of work. That is where Unpaywall comes in—it does the work for you.
Users who download and install the Unpaywall extension find that a grey or green tab appears on their browser when they visit a paywall site—a grey tab means the extension was unable to find a free version, while a green one means that it has found one. Users click on the "unlock" sign to access it.
Unpaywall does its work by accessing a database of what are known as digital object identifiers (DOIs). Jason Priem and Heather Piwowar, co-founders of Impactstory, created the basis of the extension by developing an API called oaDOI to search for relevant DOIs. They claim that their extension is able to find a free version of a paywalled paper approximately 30 percent of the time.
Explore further: Study shows more than half of peer-reviewed research articles published during 2007-2012 are now open access
More information: unpaywall.org/
Journal reference: arXiv
Bkmrk.
Privatize all scientific institutions and their products. Then enforce paywall intrusion with crime punishable by the statutes set through piracy acts.
save for later
I would imagine that altering your browser so that it reports as the Google search spider would work for this.
Perhaps that is what it is doing.
But until privatization occurs, We the People are paying for their research.
Are we not entitled to see it?
Remember, the scientific media is just as contemptible as the MSM.
Go read some Nature articles about either Global Warming or Trump and you will quickly see how taxpaying conservatives are being taken advantage of.
Not the poor publishing houses.
4Ltr
Knock! knock!
Who’s there?
Google search spider.
Okay, come in.......................
Not only what you say, but this extension isn’t hacking anything, it isn’t stealing anything, it is finding an open source of the same doc if one is available and providing a direct link to the freely available open source legal to download and open document.
Yeah several tricks are out there to get by paywalls.
So deleting the cookies on your browser to read the 11th article from the NYTimes website would now be an act of piracy?
I don't want to live in a world of your design.
In addition, why should a taxpayer (in any country) have to pay to read research results that they (taxpayers), probably in 80-90% of the cases, supported financially?
I’ve had this installed on Firefox for some months:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/paywall-pass/
You are correct. Many universities have open access repositories where their authors’ works are posted, plus pre-print servers, and many draft versions of published articles are available. Unpaywall searches these legitimate alternatives for the identical (or nearly identical) content. Unlike SciHub that searches unauthorized pirated content.
“So deleting the cookies on your browser to read the 11th article from the NYTimes website would now be an act of piracy?”
If your user agreement with BusinessA (no matter NYT or Brietbart) involves respecting the cookie policy and you violate that policy that nobody forced you to follow in the first place, you should be subject to any penalties depending on the harm you may have caused the business. Obviously, this is settled in the court of law based on existing laws in the book, so I am not arguing whether or not somebody is guilty based on this hypothetical situation.
Voluntary exchange in the free market should be respected. If the contract is 10 article limit, you either follow it or you reject the contract and don’t visit that site. So simple. Don’t make it complicated.
bmk
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