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unpaywall and ubiquitous open access

@jasonpriem | jason@impactstory.org

cofounder, Impactstory

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9 days later...

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whoa that came out of the blue!

(pun intended)

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but...did it?

  • 1853 Cayley manned glider flies
  • 1890 Clement Ader makes first powered takeoff
  • 1890s Lilienthal controlled flights in gliders
  • 1894 Chanute publishes Progress in Flying Machines
  • 1902 St Louis Aeronautical Exposition
  • 1903 Jatho makes short powered flights

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revolution is a process.

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the

Open Access revolution

is in progress.

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and we’ve all got a chance to take flight.

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  1. research shows we’ve reached the OA tipping point,
  2. but OA still has a discovery problem.
  3. unpaywall solves this problem,
  4. and libraries can benefit.

ok priem, stop waving your hands and let’s talk some specifics.

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first, a quick refresher on green, gold, hybrid, and bronze open access.

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let’s look at the current state of OA

  • 2014 Archambault et al
  • 2017 Antelmen
  • 2018 Piwowar et al
  • 2018 Muller and Iriarte

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barely half of the most-read articles require a subscription to read.

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and it’s dropping fast.

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What’s this a picture of?

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% toll-access articles vs horses per capita, USA

Data: http://bit.ly/horses-per-capita

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we see this

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get ready for this

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but there is one little problem.

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this is not an airplane

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this is not a corpus

10,000 gold journals in DOAJ

10,000 gold journals not in DOAJ

25,000 bronze and hybrid journals

5,000 green repositories

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let’s fix that.

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10,000 gold journals in DOAJ

10,000 gold journals not in DOAJ

25,000 bronze/hybrid journals

5,000 green repositories

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16 �million

OA articles

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50,000 sources

1 source

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  • 95M articles
  • 16M open access, indexed by DOI
  • includes bronze, hybrid, gold, green
  • credible sources only (no ResearchGate, Sci-Hub)
  • identifies resource version (peer-reviewed or not)
  • fast, free API
  • downloadable dataset

unpaywall database overview

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Recall: 75%

Precision: 98%

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independently assessed, compared to manual searches using Google and Google Scholar.

unpaywall database accuracy

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  • NIH
  • Research Councils UK
  • Internet Archive
  • Web of Science
  • Digital Science Dimensions
  • SFX, 360 Link, several smaller link resolvers
  • Unpaywall browser extension

unpaywall database users

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A free, open source web extension to help people find legal,

open access copies of scholarship.

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130,000

users

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Unpaywall users read 47% of articles for free.

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Link resolver integration

  • SFX, 360 Link, several others
  • 500,000 queries daily
  • only queries when library does not have holdings
  • success on 20% (100k/day)
  • used in 1500+ Libraries including UC system, British Library, MIT, et

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What can you do?

  • setup Unpaywall target in link resolver.
  • encourage faculty and students to install Unpaywall.
  • support Open Access initiatives.

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Thanks to people who’ve funded us!

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  • Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
  • DataONE
  • Dryad 
  • National Science Foundation
  • Open Society Foundations 
  • Royster Society of Fellows
  • Clarivate
  • Public Knowledge Project

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