How to find articles in open access – tips from my favorite nerd | SciELO in Perspective

"Publication of academic research results in open access is becoming more frequent and it is estimated that millions of documents are currently available online. For this reason, it is important to have efficient tools to find the free versions of the articles that we need (without paying for subscriptions or buying individual articles and using legal methods). As the need creates the offer, in the last two or three years, free applications have emerged to meet the requirements of academics, librarians, researchers, and students in general. What does the market offers nowadays?

This is where my favorite nerd, Aaron Tay – a librarian at the Singapore Management Library comes in, who recently wrote some notes1,2 on his blog, analyzing various plugins for browsers and the aggregator services that allow finding almost instantaneously complete texts in open access.

The following table shows the different services analyzed by Aaron Tay in several posts (the links are listed at the end of the post) with some comments and ratings of mine (which I consider myself a bit old to be a nerd!) Below in this post we will show examples of the two plugins that seem to us the most efficient ones – that is: they are the ones I use – but it should be a good exercise to do the tests yourself."