WHAT IS UNPAYWALL?
Unpaywall is a service that maintains a database of links to full-text articles from open-access sources all over the world. The content is harvested from legal sources including repositories run by universities, governments, and scholarly societies, as well as open content hosted by publishers themselves.
Unpaywall focuses on providing greater access to several types of open content:
- Author-Archived Open Access content (“green OA”): Unpaywall captures OA versions of articles – generally manuscript versions – that authors have posted in repositories (while the final published versions appear in paid-access journals).
- Hybrid OA content: Unpaywall captures individual articles which are available OA directly from the publisher, in a journal which is otherwise available only by paid subscription.
- Full OA journal content: Unpaywall captures articles which are published in full OA journals and indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals or other sources.
How do I find Unpaywall via the Connelly Library?
It is integrated into LibKey and into Summon.
- When you run a search in a database, like one of the EBSCO or ProQuest databases and the record does not have the full text attached, click the LibKey link. If the item is available from one of our subscribed sources or one of the many open access collections which we have chosen for our EJournal holdings (like PubMed Central or DOAJ), you will be linked. If the item is available from one of the Unpaywall sources (see above) you will see this -the Article Locator page.:
Remember that even if the article is not available in Unpaywall, you can do an ILL – which is now very fast!
- Unpaywall is also integrated into Summon. If you run a search on a topic in Summon, the default is to show only those materials we have selected in our Client Center – in other words the databases we subscribe to from various vendors or publishers, as well as Open Access collections such as DOAJ or PubMed Central. If you check the box at the top right, you can search the entire Summon database, including material beyond the Connelly Library collection. When you see your results, you may see PDF along the bottom of the citation of articles we do not subscribe to. That means that the fulltext is available from Unpaywall. Click the link to get the article. Articles that do not have the PDF link can of course be obtained via Interlibrary Loan by clicking on the title and bringing up the LibKey page (see above).
