Open Access Button v. Unpaywall: Is there a Winner? | Commons Knowledge - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"A few months back, the Commons Knowledge blog featured a post about a new feature from Impactstory called “Unpaywall.” Read that article here. This is still a relatively new tool that aims to find open access versions of articles if they are available. You can click on the lock that shows up on an article’s page if it is green or gold, and Unpaywall will take you to an OA version of that article. If only a grey lock shows up, then there is no OA version of that article that this feature can find. Similarly, the Open Access Button’s goal is to get you past paywalls. This is an older extension than Unpaywall, but is still being updated. This one works by bookmarking the button, and once you happen upon a paywalled article, you click on that bookmark. It also has a feature for when the article is not available: emailing the authors directly. The authors are then encouraged to deposit their articles in a repository, and either send a link to that or send the article directly to OAB so that they can upload it to a repository. Of course, if the author’s rights contract does not allow them to do this, then they can decline. OAB is also working with interlibrary loan departments in order to utilize this tool in those systems, which is supposed to eventually reduce the cost of sending articles between libraries."