Tech Thursday: Find Free Versions of Articles

Unpaywall is a simple browser extension that looks for free full-text versions of journal articles.

As you have perhaps guessed, I like to read. I’m lucky to have excellent institutional access to journals - and incredibly supportive library staff to help locate anything I can’t easily find myself. Even so, there are still articles I have to dig around more to locate, typically with a quick filetype:pdf search. Unpaywall is a simple browser extension that recognizes when you come across a journal article, and looks for a free version of it.

Here’s what it looks like once installed - the grey lock means that no open access versions were located, and clicking on the green lock takes you to the full text of the article:

The Unpaywall developers are careful to note that they do not search for articles posted on sites that might not have legal access to distribute articles, such as ResearchGate or SciHub (two sources for finding articles that may be shared in violation of copyright by the article authors or others).

Past Tech Thursdays

• DropBox Paper for collaboration

• Remove distracting backgrounds from photos

• “Make a copy” function in Google Drive

• Providing audio feedback

• Canvas “What-if” grades

• Working in shared Google docs

• Managing references

• Custom URLs & QR codes

• Text Expanders

• Interactive quizzing

• Screen share in Zoom

• Mailbird email program

• Using screenshots

• Voice-to-text options

• Wheel of Names (random name generator)

• Collaborating in Google Slides