Heather Piwowar on How to Read Peer-Reviewed Research for Free | Eurodoc

"If you are looking for lots of research papers, this extra googling step is a pain. It’d be better if your browser just *showed* you if there was a free version, wouldn’t it? Well, it’s your lucky day. There is a free and super easy solution for that: a browser extension for both Chrome and Firefox called Unpaywall. Install the application — it just takes a few seconds — and then any time you are on a publisher page, a little green unlock icon will pop up on the right part of the page whenever there is a free copy of the paper somewhere on the internet. Click on that icon and POOF you are at the PDF. I’m kinda partial to this solution because I’m one of the co-founders of the startup that makes it. We’re a nonprofit organisation, and the tool is open source and free, and the data behind it is all open: so you are making the world a better place by using it!...

The good news is that these googling or Unpaywalling options will work on about 50% of the papers you are likely to read (see our paper on that), with the success rate depending a bit on the discipline and age of the paper. Different fields have different habits about publishing in Open Access journals, or depositing their papers in repositories. Making research open in this way is totally legal...."