The browser extension Unpaywall enables you to easily and legally access free Open Access texts. This way you can access a wider range of economics and business studies publications for free with just one click. Learn in this blog post how you can get started quickly and enrich your research with an automatic Open Access option.
Unpaywall contains around 29 million freely accessible texts. Thanks to Unpaywall´s browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, free alternative access to a fee-based journal article is displayed in the course of a search. This service is free of charge and offered by the non-profit institution Our Research from the USA.
You can install the browser extension in just a few steps – and alternative Open Access options will be automatically displayed for every search.
How to use Unpaywall
- Call up the Unpaywall website in your browser (the Chrome browser is used in the example): https://unpaywall.org.
- Then click on “Get the Extension.”
- You will now be taken to the Unpaywall webpage for the extension. There you need to click on the blue “Add to Chrome – It’s Free” button.
- After that, you will get to the Chrome Web Store, where you just need to click on the “Add” button. Then a small pop-up window will appear. Select “Add extension” here.
By now, the browser extension is installed in Chrome and you can get started.
When you search in Chrome and click on a search result, Unpaywall will check in the future whether it finds a free version of the publication. If a free version is available, Unpaywall will show you a white open lock on a light green circular area, as shown in the screenshot.
When you search in Chrome and click on a search result, Unpaywall will check in the future whether it finds a free version of the publication. If a free version is available, Unpaywall will show you a white open lock on a light green circular area, as shown in the screenshot.
If you click the “Try it now” button after installing the brower extension, Unpaywall will demonstrate it to you with an example.
An example from business studies
The essay “Doing well while doing good? An integrative review of marketing criticism and response” in the Journal of Business Research had been randomly selected by the Open Economics Guide team.
The purchase price for the PDF would be $35.95.
But thanks to the Unpaywall browser extension, whose icon turned bright green, the full text was accessible for free on the City, University of London institutional repository.
Enjoy your search for Open Access publications!
For more information on Unpaywall, see the tool entry in the Open Economics Guide. Here you will also find many other tools for researching Open Access publications in the tool overview.
Do you know of any other interesting Open Access or Open Science tools? The Open Economics Guide team looks forward to hearing from you!
