Browser Add-ons - Legal Access to Paid Articles
You may be familiar with this situation: Time is of the essence, and you urgently need a specific scientific paper. However, even with an active VPN connection to your university, a purchase request for the desired journal article appears on the publisher's website. You can use various browser add-ons to locate freely available versions of articles, such as preprints (versions before submission) or postprints (versions after peer review), on the internet, including
- CORE Discovery
- Google Scholar (In some cases, you might get a free open access version from a repository via the “all versions” link.)
- Open Access Button
- Open Access Helper
- Unpaywall
Of course, the mentioned add-ons also have their limitations. Not every published article is secondarily published and therefore freely accessible. You can order closed access articles for a fee through interlibrary loan or our service “KLUB direkt”.
Join us and maximise the visibility of your scientific work. We encourage you to self-archive your research articles on a repository, e.g. KLUEDO, whenever possible. Please check the possibilities for secondary publication on the Sherpa Romeo website or the journal's own secondary publication options where your article was published.
You can find other useful open access tools on our website.
If you have any questions about open access and publishing, please feel free to contact the open access team. If required, please arrange an individual consultation appointment. You can reach us by e-mail (ub-openaccess(at)rptu.de).
Online Coffee Lecture: How do I legally get behind the paywall? (Video: 7:39 min)
Online Coffee Lecture: Der grüne Weg. Das Zweitveröffentlichungsrecht (Video, 7:43 min) German only